Saturday, July 08, 2006

12th wealthiest nation - hogwash!

How shameless can Indian media become? If you had read Indian papers this morning, there screaming on the front pages of every single paper was the rather pompous declaration - "India 12th wealthiest nation in 2005, says World Bank". But what stares in our face is the fact that India has actually fallen two places since 2004! Countries like Brazil and South Korea which were behind India last year are ahead of us now. But we Indians are fooling ourselves with so called 8% GDP growth stories and self generated "India has arrived!" non-sense. In the hoopla surrounding Mittal success, Indian media last week conveniently buried reports that India may have actually become a net importer of Agricultural goods. A country where farmers are committing suicide since agriculture is no longer profitable is a net importer of Agricultural goods. Wonderful! Lets continue to live in the media created Indian utopia!

5 comments:

GuNs said...

Indian media should be given less rope. There should be some restrictions now, I think. All that you see in the hundreds of blossoming news channels is blatant commercialization of news. Any little fact makes it to the prime time news with a lot of dialogues, animations and all such crap thrown in.

The Express press photo awards winner took a photo of a woman hanging herself and her husbad frantically trying to call up the ambulance. There was another photo during the rail disaster of a man trapped inside a bogey, horribly squashed and crying for help from a bent up window. I cant imagine how these photographers can stay and take photographs at times like these. Much less, publish these photographs and accept awards and accolades for them, with a smile !

Poltial parties do violent protests, burn buses, burn effigies, beat up innocent people on the roads, damage shops...all for publicity and these brainless TV channels and newspapers loyally go ahead and cover these things. What if none of the journalists turned up at such a rally? Wouldnt the purpose of such violence be defeated? But no...all our media wants is more news...to fill up their 24x7 news channels.

Time we laid some rules for the media. Too much of free speech in the media, too much of crap.

-PeAcE
--WiTh
---GuNS

Balaji Chitra Ganesan said...

Excellent Comment!

Bindu said...

Guns... sorry I am disagreeing with you again. We already don't have much freedom of speech in India. Imposing restrictions on freedom of speech is the worst thing we can do. I agree media needs to be more responsible. But not at the cost of freedom!

If you start cutting the freedom, where will it stop? Should blogs be censored too?

My hope is things will change. People are getting smart and with teh blog revolution, medid has to self regulate itself or nobody would those crappy papers.

Anonymous said...

bindu, well said. I don't think the Government should be allowed to censor speech. Journalists, editors, and publishers have to become more responsible. The problem is that we don't have an NY Times or a Washington Post in India. Newspapers like Times of India and Hindustan Times which used to be reasonably good have given in to the price wars, which has resulted in lower standards and more sensationalism.

Anonymous said...

hey,

the media is just a business as any other business....the recent channels are basically what we say in software companies as 'startups' .....so these channels do require some benefits from government inorder to survive....for if they start attacjing the govt from day 1 then they wont exist for a week....therefore the hype and the brainwashing.......its nothing new.....

but we dont need any restrictions on news reporting as freedom of speech is always important in a democracy even if the reporting is biased