Dear
Santosh Desai,
‘ Media, once regarded with respect, now seems `paid' to many’.
Thank goodness, a late reasonable realization of fact, but better late
than never.
As
a former writer myself with write ups in many magazines and newspapers in India
I have been a great admirer of your writing and I often use to tell students to
read M.J. Akbar, Arun Shourie and You as the level headed good journalists.
However,
I am ashamed to even remotely communicate to anyone about any affinity that I
have had with any of the media houses. Let me make it very clear that I do not
belong to any party blindly nor any politician nor do I suffer from any
ideological fixation.
The
media has brought this bad image upon itself by playing into the hands of certain
forces; I need not explain in detail who or what those forces are. The media
persons have every right to interpretations, ideological identities, even bias
as all these are universal human weaknesses, so no one expects them to be
immune from all these.
What
is obvious is media’s selective amnesia and collective indifference making them
use microscopes to magnify minor mistakes in usage of words [after all politicians are not specialist
linguists] whereas do not bother to report glaring non governance, non
performance for 10 years because most of the media personalities, some of the select
media houses were themselves beneficiaries of a scam of UPA government which
took them on trips abroad at the tax payers money along with the Prime Minister
on all his trips abroad, making them stay at five star hotels and treating them
like royal servants. I do not understand why no one has taken up this scam. I
wish that this is taken up seriously.
Media
houses selectively scrutinize to sensationalize and to scandalize. However, the
majority of the educated youth who do not pander to these devious designs but fortunately
and soberly follow facts from several sources. It is unfortunate that the media
houses forget that today the world is so well connected that fooling all the people
all the time is not that easy.
What
is sickening about media is its taking a definite stand to not to look into any
good work, adamantly portraying some select personalities and parties as bad
and using a telescope to search for some missing leader of a particular party and
this definitely makes it obvious as if these media houses were paid for promoting
that particular person. They resort to selective stinking sting operations. I
have a list of challenges to the media. But I am equally aware most of them are
more corrupt than most politicians of any party because media also contributes
to psychological and cultural corruption.
Besides
these TV anchors sit on judgment on all issues without even doing the necessary
home work.
They
all ran an orchestrated propaganda against a individual who has, thanks to these
very third rate desperate high decibel media debates , and thanks to the public and common man not believing in these third
rate media tricks has emerged as one of the best prime ministers this country
has ever had.
Even
a school kid has accessibility to information through multiple means today and the
present generation is intelligent enough not to be mislead by these biased media
reporting however much they may try any of the old tricks. The rules of the game
of information dissemination and facts finding their way out of and raising
above the froth of falsities and fantasies of India’s fourth pillar have all
changed very much.
I
could foresee this reverse trend way back in 2010 and I have been talking about
it in many places and I also wrote the following blog post in 2013 after
someone else within the active media wrote something similar.
Stop
sticking on to old tricks. Fortunately for India and also in many parts of the
world where there are educated youth who can differentiate the chaff from the
grain cannot be made fallible to these old tricks which most of these paid
media houses are following. Just quoting few of the old tricks here :- . Joseph
Goebbels "What you need to
control a media system is apparent diversity which conceals an actual
uniformity" and also proving Stephany Yablow totally correct
"Inevitably, the media create a circus, elevating everything and
elucidating nothing." It also establishes well what Charles Eisenstein
said, "From brand names to PR slogans to political codewords, the language
of the media that inundates modern life consists almost wholly of subtle lies,
misdirection, and manipulation."
Today as I am writing this
one leader belonging to an extinct party of which he has been elected as the General
Secretary, to make the post ready after three years for the wife of the present
incumbent- it is left dynasty so let us look the other way- is shown on most TV
channels that the present ruling party BJP has got only 31% of total votes,
fine, why no media person is asking him how much percentage that his leftover
Left got all over India?
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