Today’s social media come under a few big global names - the Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Twitter and the Microsoft. The slightly ‘older’ media – the television and cinema – also fall under a few global names – Disney, NewsCorp (Star), Viacom, Time Warner and Bertelsmann. Almost all the ...
The loss of credibility is perhaps the most serious concern of the Indian media today. Many within the media can feel it but are reluctant to accept it fully because of a variety of reasons. Media persons per se tend to shift the ‘blame’ to the promoters who are interested more in business than ...
In a recently concluded global conference in New York on ‘news literacy’, the assembled teachers and professionals expressed concern at the alarming rate in which ‘fake news’ was invading the media, specially the social media. They realised that the problem was too large for any organi...
Between the devil and the deep sea.The murder of Gauri Lankesh confirms the crisis journalism is facing today: on one hand, you submit to power and lose your credibility; and on the other, you defy and get killed. A report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says that so far ( calcu...
The Supreme Court’s 547 page-long judgement on privacy is not just a legal landmark; it’s a learned document, well-referenced, on how information technology today, if not properly controlled, can be a palpable threat to human life and freedom. The judgement on one hand has reversed its earlier p...
Plato banished the poets and writers from his ‘ideal’ world of the Republic because they were ‘liars’. But the ‘orators’ – who turned out to be the politicians and parliamentarians – were allowed an entry. We wonder what Plato’s stand would be today in the 21st century ‘republic...
While we describe the 21st century as the “Information Age” with the boom in news and information bombarding us through its various ‘superhighways’, we find, quite regretfully, that the media houses are killing themselves through uncalled for internal squabbles. The editor of The Economic an...
The Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan advised the journalists in a meeting in Delhi the other day to avoid ‘unpleasant truths’ and write only ‘nice things’. True, today’s paper is full of news ofviolence, corruption, communal hatred, terrorism, and rape. You hardly find a ‘positive’ st...
It took a long time for journalism to enter into the portals of the university. Journalists have been described as ‘scatter-brained’ and ‘muck rakers’ by western scholars and in the late nineteenth century, only one or two American universities had agreed to allow jou...