An emergent people's journalism finally in India?
Rajeev Srinivasan on how a spontaneous movement of neutral, patriotic, non-professional citizen journalists and commentators on the Internet may be rewriting norms in media
Some journalists get confused and start believing they make the news, rather than just report it. This, and journalistic groupthink, has led to a grotesquely skewed discourse: India's supposed 'centrists' would be considered 'far Left' elsewhere. Their conventional wisdom is curiously anti-national as well.
"All the news that is fit to print" simply isn't printed in India, only that which supports a particular viewpoint. Besides, those who do not toe the line are blackballed: you cannot get published, period. Several people have told me about their personal experience of being excluded for their views.
This perverted system engenders a persistent anti-India bias in international media, too. When in India, foreign correspondents interact primarily with Delhi's insular, incestuous journalist-sling-bag-wallah nexus that sneers at middle India; their endemic prejudices infect the foreigners.
At least Western media pays lip service to being non-judgmental. In India, there is an obvious industrialist-politician-journalist axis. They 'manufacture consent'. But they were caught red-handed, Watergate-style, in the Radia tapes incident. Thereupon the entire media closed ranks, and simply buried the story, hoping it would go away: this tactic has always worked in the past. Unfortunately for them, this time it didn't work, because Internet readers, especially Twitterati (those using the instant, SMS-like, 140-character Twitter social network), reflected popular outrage, and kept the issue alive.
Self-important scribes became concerned about their image on Twitter. When they were not given fawning adulation, they began abusing Twitterati as cave-dwelling illiterates or "Internet Hindus", showing their habitual scorn for the 'little people'. One even threatened people with IPC 509, "insulting the modesty of a woman", simply for questioning her dogmas.
But the Twitterati, mostly middle-class, urban, young, tech-savvy Indians both in India and abroad, were not browbeaten, and responded in kind – and in this level-playing-field medium, they had exactly the same access as any high-and-mighty journalist. The latter, accustomed to being little tin-pot dicators, and to being able to say 'off-with-their-heads' and censor any opinions and retorts they didn't like in their media, were quickly put on the defensive.
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1 comment:
Yes, the jholawalla journos are an inbreeding cesspool.
The question also arises, for example, what is happening to the Radia tapes incident ? The conceited media blackout is surely helping the episode - ever so slowly - to fade away from public memory. For how long can the interest be maintained in common people with lesser access to Internet, about that particular episode?
The next time a common person buys a newspaper run by these slimes or switches on the TV for some news, the only news that is on there is that which is manufactured by these slimes !
Until the time where the Internet availability is far easier and there is greater awareness about the kind the manipulation the journos indulge in, it seems quite a struggle to influence public opinion in a decisive way.
Having said that, I feel the vernacular dailies are far better equipped to influence common readers (who are also very discerning). Unfortunately, these are also being bought and gobbled up by the conglomerates with "secular" tilt.
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