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The quality of news coverage by the Indian media has vastly improved over the last few decades. On the flipside, however, the Fourth Estate is facing major concerns such as paid news and declining language skills.
“The Indian media today does a far better job of informing the Indian public than it used to do thirty or forty years ago.…Go back to 30 years and look at the front page. You would be hard-pressed to find strong reporting about the city. Coverage of urban affairs, civic affairs is far better today,” Siddharth Varadarajan, Editor, The Hindu , said on Saturday.
He was addressing a panel discussion — “Has the Media Failed the People” — organised by the city-based Calcutta Chamber of Commerce
“Coverage of Government; virtually every pronouncement of the Prime Minister or President, were the headlines 30 years ago....Today it’s much more robust… story for story, a lot more of the warts that exist in India are being highlighted,” he added.
Impact
According to Varadarajan, paid news is one cancer that has been rooted in the system and it invariably leads to blackmailing.
Maintaining that the impact of news stories is hardly seen, Varadarajan questioned whether it was just the media that has failed the people or whether other organisations are equally responsible for this.
“Is it the media that has failed the people or are there lots of other people, lots of other institutions that are also failing the people? At the end of the day, you don’t trigger correction at the judicial level, at the political level or at the level of civil society; then there is only so much we can do,” he said.
Noted actor Rahul Bose too added that the big question was whether the people had failed the media or not.
“Have the people of India failed its media? …. Do we support, recognise, encourage or fund organisations that have been fighting for different causes for decades? Do we change attitudes within us?” he questioned.
Other panellists, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Editor, Editorial Pages, The Telegraph and Rahul Kanwal, Editor, Aaj Tak/ Headlines Today too opined that the media has played an important role.
However, Parliamentarian Saugata Roy, categorically blamed the media for letting down the countrymen.
According to him, business interests have been given preference with businessmen controlling media houses and rural reporting was one such casualty.
“What has happened to the media is that it has become a big business. Media as we know or see today has failed the country,” Roy said.
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