The
Indian media was once a monopoly in radio and Television with AIR and
Doordarshan being the only players in the market along with print media. This
was the times of 70s and 80s. People
across the country would take time out from their routine activities to hear
the news on radio and the evening news in Doordarshan. Then in 19901, Indian government initiated the
economic reforms, an era of liberalisation and privatisation.
In February 1995 a landmark Supreme Court
judgement ruling declares that " airwaves are a public property. They have
to be controlled and regulated by a public authority in the interest of the
public and to prevent the invasion of their rights." The judgement outlines
autonomy for Prasar Bharati and opened the broadcasting to private players.
Since
then, we have started seeing many private channels enter the News channel
segment. Today, we have over 100 news channel in India with all different channels
in nature of language and content. Same
we have seen increase in print media also.
Every
morning I see the newspaper being delivered just outside my door step, reading
early in the morning, hoping to read some good stuff in paper. I open
the newspaper only to find not so good things on the social front in the very
first page be it on corruption, rape, murder, terrorism, politics and others.
This doesn’t leave a good feeling early in the morning. The same I see in TV. The television channels
go extra mile on such news though their prime time shows, panel discussion and
in regular news.
What
I have noticed during my short stay abroad of 6 months, people abroad were saying
that they are very scared to travel to India on a holiday. The reason given to
me was because of insecurity feeling which is due to reasons stated above. How do they come to know the happenings of
such event? Yes, its the way Indian media has projected India to the outside
world. India was projected as a country with corruption, lack of safety
feeling, downward trend in economy and whole lot of social issues. This had left a poor portrayal of our image
abroad. Sometimes, our media by blowing
news out of proportion gives more courage to the hooligans to go extra mile and
makes things even worse. (JNU, Mumbai attacks, Politics) . Tell me one thing,
if the media didn’t give a damn over publicise such news, none of this would
have lasted for such long time as they are now. But when we see foreign news
channel, we don’t see such things being blown out. Our media shows us what they want to show and
not what people want to see.
Our
media must realise that they are also ambassadors of our country and they have
huge responsibility along with freedom of speech. This must not be misused. It
is important that they show the social issues in television/ print media so as
to make people aware of same. At the same time, it is important that they do
not blow it out of proportion so as to send wrong messages outside the country.
Our
country is very beautiful, has rich culture, heritage which should be used in
the right channel and right manner. No doubt, the Indian media can play a huge
part for our country to grow. The media has showcased very good initiatives with
Siachen coverage, flood relief, earthquake relief, Swach Bharat and Green
environment, save the tiger initiatives, Citizen Journalists and others.
Really it's high time that our media should start doing responsible reporting.
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ReplyDeleteWell written..Media should redirect the Nation to its correct path...
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