Media mayhem
Related to the media monkeyism happening in this country that interests and deplores me often - I read with great interest, the points of view of Barkha Dutt in the Saturday Hindustan Times.
She seems to be taking a fair and impartial point of view when she writes about the media, though being part of the media and that is something I at times wonder about, if she is part of the team that decides what makes sense and what does not, or she is maybe taking pot-shots at various other channels and mediums... it is difficult to tell in these times and days
as they say so much so that Politics makes strange bedfellows, these days, this phrase applies not just politics but to the legal, media and entertainment and almost all the new age industries that try to make hay as the sun shines.
No matter how things turn around in this day and age, but one thing is coming out quite clear that all those idioms and phrases that we used to read in our language and literature seem to hold all the more true all along these times. And I miss the use of those chaste phrases esp. in Hindi, since English is taking over as the de-facto lingua franca for all Indians, and the local culture and language is getting impacted big time due to what they would attribute to Globalization.
So coming back to the media modicum, most of the big news that the media is throwing at our collective faces revolve around some murder or malpractice and how the police botch up all such cases under intense pressures of all kinds.
I wonder what kind of value are people attaching to what we all have read being our fundamental right - the right to life. The law and order mechanism, that is supposed to be a pillar of any society as per social science studies does not seem to hold true for this country any more.
The media is another of those pillars. I tend to think more about the media because in a way I have given up on the police system. They are a spoiled lot, corrupted from inside, with the general public totally at the mercy of the officers whenever any crime is to be recorded. But the emerging media, the not so old and beaten down pillar supporting social governance is still in it's formation stages. So there is a huge scope for course correction early on.
But ironically it seems otherwise, looking at the way things are panning up.
Unless someone pitches in to correct things right now, so as to get a better picture of how the media can take some major responsibility to show things in the right perspective, we the people will end up seeing only that what the media controllers and the politicians want to show and that is my dear friend, never going to be what we call the True Picture.
So should we all not being doing something about it NOW?
|