Media is becoming cowardly and now more corrupt too!
Paid news exposed the big newspapers! Now, the some of the big newspapers demonstrate shocking cowardliness. Towards the more corrupt and fascist governments that arm twist the newspaper owners and editors too, Mr.B.G.Verghese, the senior most editor and veteran newspaper man has exposed how the Press Council’s two member investigation team that enquired into the paid news scandal is unable to do anything and a new 11 member Press Council is formed to see how the report can be modified, moderated or twisted or simply buried!
This scandal of a very different nature. This scandal is killing the very concept of press freedom as we have known it all along. Now, newspaper managements which stand to benefit from the paid news anyway and we can understand. And also, let us remember that most large scale newspaper managements are Marwair-owned and where they are owned by Brahmins they are timid and cowardly! They may write in old-fashioned prose, with jargon and what have you and yet you can find that either it is written so that the English language hides more than reveals and the new breed of illiterate politicians don’t anyway read them!
The Editors’ Guild is supposed to have disagreed with the Newspaper managements, so they published the Editors “code of conduct” on the paid news but the code was not published in spite of it being adopted in a well-attended meeting.
So, what have you?
Newspapers are supposed to inform and enlighten you! But now, we see the very opposite!
The newspaper owners see to it their nefarious activities don’t get printed in their own newspapers.
In fact, very blackout is what they have achieved.
Is this an open society? Or, is it a very paranoid society?
Where even the establishment feels secure and a bit easy when there is no news in the papers, no news that might disturb the ruling class?
Writes Varghese:”It is no secret. The lineup is clear and it makes clear who calls the shot?”
So, what about the self-governing ethics of the Press Council?
Much more disturbing is the role of the print media in the many scandals that rocked the government recently.
Telecom scandal was the biggest money spinner for all stake holders!
The lobbyists came out from the hide and they were seen as the big time money operators.
Writes Varghese: The telecom spectrum investigations by both the income tax dept and also by the CBI and the telecom authorities named leading corporate houses(who else but the top one and two only!),famous media persons,(who else who but the fast selling top corporate style-run two newspaper groups only) and these bad guys wanted the government headed by none else by a decent man, it is these corporate who bent the government’s moral authority to render justice and do things” in a particular manner”.
What is the particular manner?
To cause a huge loss, running into thousands of crores for the poor, the tax and other revenue loss caused by the way the telecom spectrum was distributed.
Where is truth in government?
Where the inheritors of the Mahatma legacy?
Why the silence?
Says Varghese:”Aspects of this sordid record, including official papers and approved telephone intercepts, are now in private circulation in the form of what are called the Radia papers, named after one of the leading lobbyists allegedly involved”.
Says the same veteran:”The money in question reportedly runs into tens of thousands of crore which is being used to buy acquiescence or silence, provide slush funds and win influential support”.
But in the process some good things also happened.
The press went underground so to say and nothing came out in the open.
To that extent the Indian press proved itself unworthy of the moral support it imagines it has from the Indian people.
No, the Indian people now must be a bit wiser people.
They should wake up and be assured that they are not served by their press!
On the other hand, the TV channels too saw the plummeting of their much widely believed TRP ratings.
The NDTV and CNN-IBN saw their rasting fell drastically.
On the other hand, the Headlines Today and even the obscure channel 9 from Bangalore went up dramatically.
Headlines today played the Telecom minister Raja’s tapes, the tapes that were played by the Headlines Today so fully and repeatedly, the lobbyist, Radia telling Raja, the minister that his job was secured thanks to the intervention of the corporate pressure!
Also, the tapes intercepted with the written permission of the Home Secretary and so the government knew that something wrong was happening all the time in the telecom scandal and yet Manmohan Singh government couldn’t do anything except to transfer the CBI officer who filed the FIR and submitted his findings!
See how our government is serving the people?
How our urban, stylish, well-dressed men and women, the very cream of society, the TV anchors, both gentlemen and ladies proved such an unreliable moral cowards!
So, this is India, this is the India you and me, the very youth of this country are dreaming to create is being constructed by our architects of governance and also articulators, the media, both the shameful print and the faint hearted TV channels!
Image Source : internetretailing.net