Surfing through news today, I hit upon a report of Pranoy Roy seeking accountability and transparency from the Indian media and wanting a strong defamation law to handle spurious news and wrong accusations. Kudos to him to rake up this issue at a time when the current news channels create nuisance, unnecessarily at times!

I still remember how I started watching news early on in my life, specially ‘The World This Week’ and the DD National news in the evening. It gave me a strong footing to understand and appreciate world-wide happenings and improve my idea of the world. And all of it was cultured, sedate reporting and talks/debates to put forth the complete view-point, most of it thoroughly researched.

But today’s media in India has sadly been reduced to a caricature of its previous self of high standards and professional, authentic viewpoints. What we are witnessing these days are shenanigans of channels and anchors turning news into soap-operas to garner more eyeballs and prolong their life…

Talking about television media particularly, these intelligentsia claim that they are the true champions of democracy and are responsible for everything that’s right, bringing out everything’s that wrong! However, most of the news items seem biased and planted to favour one or the other party and the ensuing debate is cacophonous at best! And even God cannot help their ‘targets’, who is/are portrayed as a criminal or wrong-doer just by the way they are dealt with… 🙂

I am no judge of who is right or wrong but I do hope that television media becomes as sensitive to the veracity of what they are showing, and more importantly empathy towards their viewers (not repeating the same thing all day, multiple times) and participants (who look like sitting ducks most of the times)!

Otherwise they risk losing out on audience who are as such moving to the internet and other sources of getting their news rather than watching the news channels. And it’s happening not only because of changing tastes, but also because people like me value a fair and free opinion/reporting above everything else.

Hopefully that day comes soon!