Responsible Journalism Anyone?

Well, it's been a long time (infact more than a month) since I last posted here. A lot of things have been happening around me and I was just taking my time soaking it in! I turned 25 some time last month and thanks to a bunch of friends it was one of the best days I have had in a long time now. Thanks a ton folks! Coming back to the title of this post, I have been wondering whatever happened to responsible journalism in our country? If you have been following News in Indian dailies across the last fortnight or so you would have probably cursed the Indian media on more than one occasions by now. First it was the Sania-Shoaib episode which was blown way out of proportion and then followed the Tharoor-Modi episode which have been hogging the limelight and front pages of the leading dailies masking the more noteworthy news related to the Naxals killing 75 CRPF personnel in Chattisgarh and the more recent failure of India's first indigenous cryogenic engine fired GSLV. Why were the last two episodes deemed not worthy enough for the front page? Who is to be blamed? Editors or Readers?

So much has been talked and discussed about the Sania-Shoaib and Tharoor-Modi episodes that I don't even want to talk about them anymore (but can't help raising a couple of questions on them though!). Infact I had no trouble finding good news articles for these two but for the next two I had to poke around a little. While Sania-Shoaib wedding was just a celebrity wedding going through it's hiccups, I was left dumb-struck with the way it concluded. I mean all that hullabaloo just for INR 15 000 (USD 300) alimony settlement? Who are you kidding dude? No wonder , rumor is that Shoaib paid close to INR 150 000 000 (USD 300 000) for the actual settlement!

Coming to Tharoor-Modi public spat, it's a pity that an event as successful as IPL is involved in this controversy. First of all, the Government should bell the Board of Control for Cricket in India aka BCCI (which at present is exempted from taxes) for it's no longer a non-profit sports body working for the upliftment of the sport in the country. It rakes in billions of dollars from several endorsement deals and the Indian Premier League (IPL) has even put the English Premier League (EPL) to shame when it comes to salaries paid for some of the top players. It's hightime BCCI opened its doors to the public eye and come clean on its financial transactions. It won't surprise me if it's learned (if ever), that BCCI's revenue is more than sufficient to fund the entire sports infrastructure of all the major sports in India! In a cricket-crazy nation like India, many of the indigenous sports have lost their sheen. With IPL hogging the front (controversies) and last pages (actual match coverage), the very fact that India won the International Kabaddi World Cup 2010 just a couple of days ago was lost somewhere in the unread sections of the dailies. Infact the first news article that Google pointed me to was A Pakistan News! What an irony? India beat Pakistan hands down (58-24) in India and the news gets more coverage in Pakistan than in India! Perhaps the absence of Pakistani players in the present IPL season has done some good for sports journalism in our neighbouring country.

Now coming to the more note-worthy news in last couple of weeks, the brutality of the Naxal attack in Chattisgarh points how ill-equipped our intelligence department is. Shortage of manpower or technology, am not sure, but 75 CRPF personnel were sacrificed in this heinous attack, which is a slap on the anti-terror infrastructure in the nation. All this happened after Maoist leader Kishenji offered truce and our Home Minister P. Chidambaram perhaps thought it was way beyond his dignity to place a call to a Maoist leader and hence the talks (if you can even label it a talk) failed. It's no consolation that the very minister offered to step down from the ministry after the attacks for 75 patriots lost their lives all for the minister's reluctance to initiate a talk. If the talks had failed and there was an attack, it would have been a totally different scenario but the minister failed to even initiate a dialog process which if I were to use to Twitter terminology label as: #epicfail!

India has always prided on it's indigenous Space technologies and Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is one of the most respected institutes in India and abroad. But the recent failure of GSLV has set the tongues wagging on the credibility of indigenous technologies. I couldn't find the exact stastics to support my argument but going by the number of launch failure news I have read over the years, my personal observation is that ISRO has a better track record than most institutes who have been in business for 20 years or more. We can expect ISRO to be back on track with it's next launch.

Now coming to responsible journalism, whose fault it really is? Should we blame the editors for pushing the eye-catching controversies to the front page? I don't think so, for all the editors are trying to do is feed us news we want to read. With the advent of internet and mobile phones, the shelf life of news has reduced exponentially. So just covering a noteworthy event is not bound to get enough eyeballs rolling on the article or hits on the webpage, thus forcing the editors to push controversial articles to the front page. Controversies increase reader participation in the form of comments (online news) and word of mouth (there are several talk shows discussing print news on TV) which translates into better sales (or hits in the online scenario). Come to think of it, it's the end users, readers like you and me who have forced this unwelcome change in the way news is being covered in our dailies today. Instead of blaming the editors, we should make it a point to appreciate noteworthy news and shun unwanted coverage when its thumped upon us. It's a two-way system and with better participation from both sides, we can ensure that the News industry maintains the standard without having to compromise on readership coverage or ad revenue.