Saturday, December 6, 2008

Terrorizing Media

This topic is highly contextual.. As the world lays shell shocked and sends out strong condemning remarks about the terror attacks, we are slowly limping back to normalcy..trying to comprehend the huge lapse in security, saluting the brave martyrs, abuse the failed politicians and nursing a wounded Mumbai... As we try to unwind the entire mesh and get to the root cause of the problem, we find many crosswords in between that point fingers at various sources. Greedy, unfaithful politicians who had absolute disregard for brave martyrs, reluctant security system that does not detect,let alone challenge any ammunition in their swanky 'metal detectors' and of course...the award winning entry goes to the media that swarms around the terror spots and hogs for news..rather views. A special toast to the media is worthy.. In the name of spreading the word about the horrendous incident, they only sensationalised it, bloated it ten times over, blew it out of context and flaunt in a jazzy, thriller flick manner. All that was missing was probably a can of coke and pop corn to watch some live thriller movie on terror attacks. While the visual media is expected to play a benign role of simply communicating the news with a solemn, unruffled, subdued expression, they did quite the contrary...Call out politicians,celebrities, aam-aadmi, raise voice, turn aggressive and fanatical on the entire issue. Rather than dousing the flames of unrest, fear and panic they aggravated it even more.. What's worse, they have SMS Polls and Views about what the country feels about the issue.. All this is shielded in the name of 'People's Opinion'. What a farce!! I read an article somewhere that coined a new term of 'TV Terror' and that is truly what each one of us went through. While all the hypes, all the shouts of anger and protests are driven towards terror attacks, nobody actually realises that the media is carrying this mission with the agenda of scoring a high TRP. Our bloods boil looking at the ghastly pictures of terror encounter, our hairs raise every time we look at Rajdeep or Bharkha or Arnab shout angrily about the massacre and get agitated with the dirt cheap fights and blame game on the bureaucratic failure. Now all these lead to only one objective: High TRP's. Fancy titles like 'Enough is Enough' or 'Special Live Edition on Terror Attacks' or 'Inside stories: What really happened??' or 'India's 9/11' are all just baits for the public to fall for. What's worse..we don't really have a choice but to fall for it. In the recent times, it has been widely acknowledged that media of any form visual, audio or print has stretched too far creeping into what's not real. News are not news anymore, they are views..as expressed by media. The once powerful voice of public has now turned into an ugly fiend monopolising and bullying public...turning unreal to real and real to fiction. This is the sad plight of today's media. The ethics and code of conduct of media is endangered. As rational citizens, I strongly urge that it is our sole responsibility to turn tables around and put media into place. The manner in which we go about it is thought provoking..

1 comment:

Maverick said...

good to see u post again...
i wud agree with u on the media providing more views than hard facts...but its also our responsibility to get the facts from the noise and make it known...if that can be done on a broader scale...like writing on the readers opinion page n putting it forward..maybe that can help...

the problem is...there is no watchdog for the media...n its me and u...that have to whack them wen they go off limits...in general, the standard of reporting has indeed declined in recent times...