Pointing out that a disconnect exists between the mass media and mass reality in India today, the Magsaysay Award winner and the Rural Affairs Editor of ‘The Hindu’ daily, P.Sainath had said the media had lost its sense of priorities and was out of touch with the problems of a vast section of the population of the country. He was delivering the Silver Jubilee Lecture on “Mass media; But where are the masses?” at the Indira Gandhi National Open University in New Delhi on June 30. Mourning the disappearance of a number of social sector beats from newspapers, the veteran journalist had said, “You see it in the simplest and most direct way - the organisation of beats. Many beats have become extinct. Take labour correspondents: when labour issues are covered at all, they come under the head of ‘Industrial Relations’ and they are covered by Business correspondents. That means they are covered by the guy whose job is to walk in the tracks of corporate leaders, and who, when he deigns to look at labour, does it through the eyes of corporate leaders. Find me the Agriculture columnist - in most newspapers, the idea does not exist. If you lack correspondents on those two beats, you are saying 70 per cent of the people in this country do not matter you.”
Sainath is not alone. In fact, his is the voice of the voiceless working journalists, damned to work for and under powerful groups in the industry, ironically supposed to work at the voice of the voiceless multitudes. The media today has a structural compulsion to lie as several media companies have interests in various arms of the economy. ‘Private treaties’ and ‘paid news’ were undermining the media’s credibility. Out of the ruins of private treaties, emerged paid news. Private treaties which gave media companies financial stakes in companies became worthless after the stock market tanked in 2008-09. Paid news enabled these corrupt companies and politicians to make unrecorded cash transactions during the Assembly and General elections in 2009, particularly in the states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. The Press Council feigns expressing its concern but unable to halt it. Another malady afflicting the print and electronic media is that most of the groups have their own political interests to grind and the resultant casualty is always neutrality and objectivity, the basic ethics of journalism. This retrograde tendency is more prevalent in Tamil Nadu.
The media coverage and editorials of most of the crucial issues concerning the people are dwarfed by trivial but sensational issues like two models’ suicide in recent times in newspapers, periodicals and television channels. These two suicides received saturation coverage, featuring regularly on page one and becoming a lead story on TV news. When the former model Viveka Babajee was alive, the media ignored her. She had her moment of fame in the 1990s and then quickly faded from public consciousness. By the turn of the century, the media had moved on, finding new models to photograph and to write about. If Viveka had lived, the chances are she would never have featured in the media again. No matter how much she caved in, the media would have denied her the oxygen of publicity. It is ironic then, that she had to die to make the front page. The truth is that most people had either forgotten about her or, in the case of a younger generation, had never heard of her. She became famous once again only because of the manner of her passing. Suddenly, the mediapersons were all vultures picking at the carrion of her life, going over the details of her romances, and discussing whether she had hoped to marry her boyfriend. In death, she went from being once famous model to becoming fodder for celebrity gossip. That the media should be so obsessed with her suicide or for that reason the romances of celebrities in the films world, or the naïve and stupid observations and views of some film actors, tell us something about how the values of tabloid journalism and page three have taken over quality papers and page one. It is absurd that these details should be a lead headline in news broadcasts and it would be comical, if it were not so tragic that respectable news channels should devote their airtime to debate about them.
Is this what journalism has been reduced to? Do not be fooled by claims of the media that they are acting out of concern for the models and their families or anybody else. Hundreds of women commit suicide every year. Ordinary people suffer terrible heartache. Farmers killed themselves and their children because they were unable to feed their families. These tragedies, these heartbreaks and these suicides get very little space in the media. Nobody cares for ordinary people and their stories. The media don’t give a damn about poor farmers destined by the crushing weight of debt in many states. They never focus on young women – of the same age as Nafisa or Viveka – who take their lives in similar circumstances. They are merely pandering to the lowest common denominator for commercial considerations. They know that combine sex, glamour and death find a ready market. And so, tossing aside all normal standards of newsworthiness, they plunge headlong into the cesspool of tabloid sensation.
Another distressing malady afflicting the media is craving for super profits at the cost of justice to their readers/viewers. There were times when advertisements were interspersed between news items/ TV programmes. Of late, the reverse is happening in respect of both print and electronic media. As most of the ads are obtained from corporate sector, a policy of undue appeasement of big business resulting in unfair treatment of readers/viewers and people, is practiced by all media houses. You have daily supplements on different subjects like Properties, Education (higher), Job Opportunities, Films, Health (Upper classes and corporates), Fashion, Automobiles, Sports, Younger Generations (moneyed IT professionals), which generate huge advertisement incomes; but not on subjects of concern for common people, like Primary Education, Public Healthcare, Agriculture etc.,
Along with these common negative features in the media obtaining at the national level, the media in Tamil Nadu in general, or a section of it in particular, suffer from a strange but false dichotomy, considering emanation of the policies, statements, schemes and programmes of the elected government concerning the interests of the people, as sycophantic and giving undue coverage to the speeches and statements of the Opposition, however frivolous and untrue they may be, as neutrality. Their readers/ viewers and the people at large are the hapless victims, particularly when the responsive, responsible and compassionate DMK government is at the helm and a reckless and irresponsible megalomaniac Jayalalitha is the Leader of the Opposition.
Traditionally the media in Tamil Nadu in general was not only unsympathetic but more hostile to the Dravidian movement and later turned their hostility on the DMK, being the genuine offshoot of the movement and pampering anti-DMK elements, particularly Jayalalitha. Although many in the media have given up this traditional orientation, a section is still stubbornly and more virulently sticking on to the tradition. This tendency can be particularly observed in respect of the newspapers of a bilingual newspaper group, founded and nurtured by a fearless doyen of journalism and the issues of another Tamil periodical group founded by a yet another most respected and prominent stalwart in the field. Both these groups suffer from the same paranoia of Kalaignar as their principal patron Jayalalitha is, that they dutifully carry out a sinister campaign journalism against the DMK government and Kalaignar.
The newspaper group has an Editor-in-Chief, whose only assignment seems to be spitting venom on Kalaignar and his family members and extol Jayalalitha. He stoops so low to yellow journalism to denigrate Kalaignar that he has given the common headline ‘Reductio ad absurdism” for his columns possibly asking the readers to treat whatever he writes as absurd. But they publish letters of readers congratulating him for his ‘brilliant exposes.’ Patting oneself on his back! The English paper has another regular German columnist, married not only to a Hindu women but also to rabid Hindutva ideology. In his turn he spits venom on Muslims and carries out a blatant communal hate campaign in the paper founded by the late secular and democratic stalwart. Their Tamil daily also has a DMK and Kalaignar-baiter as Editor and a cartoonist to buttress his ego. All and sundry anti-DMK elements in Tamil Nadu are given exclusive columns in the Tamil Daily.
Leaving aside their past record, the publications of these two groups in recent weeks were hell bent on portraying the grand World Classical Tamil Conference in bad light that they tailored the objective reports of their reporters to suit their ends. Jayalalitha’s ‘ultimatum’ or ‘memorandum’ to the President of India to give her assent for making Tamil as the language of Madras High Court before coming to inaugurate the conference the day after, was published in eight columns with Jaya’s big image for about half-a-page. Do not the learned journalists of the group know that the Presidency in India is an office bound by the Union Council of Ministers and that she can do very little on their memorandums? The paper reported that mediapersons were ‘sidelined’ during the inaugural session and were seated 250 feet away from the podium, thereby handicapping them from moving with delegates from abroad and elicit their views. There were 700 mediapersons at the conference and security considerations owing to the presence of the President was well received by all reporters present there. And they had full five days to interact with delegates but this daily did not even publish a single interview with any whereas others did a lot. So it was a complaint for complaint sake. Similarly when every participant and the Press in general hailed the non-partisan manner in which the conference was held, this daily said ‘the DMK cadre turned the meet political’ citing a few private cars of DMK functionaries displaying party posters (!). It also reported that praise for Kalaignar by some speakers pushed behind singing praise for Tamil. Kalaignar himself intervened in a seminar attended by all-Party leaders and asked the speakers to stop praising him and get into the subject. Beyond that what could be done? However, their Editor of the Tamil daily, who was associated in one of the conference committees and also addressed a seminar, writing in his pen name in his literary column, said that ‘’there could be some flaws here and there in a mega event of this size and that should be ignored. Those who do not want to appreciate may better desist from making any unsavory comments. As for praise of Kalaignar, it can be criticized if only the earlier World Tamil conferences held in the State passed on without hailing the patron-Chief Ministers of the days.”
The Tamil journal group which had the presence of 10 of its reporters and photographers, published two negative reports on the conference in their biweekly ‘investigative journal’, one of which on an Academic session ipso facto conceded the free and frank discussions held without any interference. It is long since Tamil ‘investigative journals’, left without floating readership now, have lost credibility and seriousness. Whenever their circulation tumbles down, they publish perverted sex stories with sexy photographs on the cover. They aptly call their main feature as ‘cover stories’ because they are invariably fictitious. One publisher-owner of such journal used to get some photograph, ask his sub-editors working in the editorial desks to give a suitable title in order to print the covers beforehand and some other person will write a cover ‘story’ accordingly, thereby committing a blatant fraud on their readers taking them for granted.
Kalaignar has wondered how the media had forgotten Jayalalitha justifying the killing of Tamils in Sri Lanka till January 2009 and accusing him of patronizing a ‘banned terrorist organisation’, while publishing her present statement. Even during the peak of the Second World War, Nazi Germany could not set up underground bunkers to accommodate 50,000 people and the media miserably fail to see through her illogical claim while publishing her stupid statement.
While writing reviews of Tamil films, these newspapers and journals go to town pulling up the producers and directors of producing stereotypes full of sex and violence pandering the debase interests of the people. It is time for them to self introspect and find for themselves where they stand.
Some TV channels and newspapers have been more responsible and behaved better than others. The worrying thing is that journalists and editors don’t even realize that they are doing something wrong. The new credo is : if it sells, let’s do it. Journalists spend a lot more time diagnosing society’s ills. But sometimes, they should look at the state of their own health.
On religion, Karl Marx said “Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creatures, the heart of the heartless world, the soul of the soulless conditions” before concluding his famous quotation, “Religion is the opium of the people.” To be fair unto them even religions have undergone some progressive reforms since his days to keep in time and to hold their influence on their respective sects. But media has undergone a retrogressive fall from the high moral standards and ethics of the past. If Marx were reborn he would have said “The media is the opium of the people.”
(11-07-10)
No comments:
Post a Comment