Is The Media Become Trojan Horse For Politicians, Corporates andVested Interest Groups

Gurbir Singh, Secretary of The Mumbai Press Club should be commended for this thursday's dialogue initiated at the Club about the present state of affairs of media.

The issues which used to be discussed in the canteens of publications have suddenly burst out in open. The owners and management do not allow publication as an independent fourth estate, as they have their own vested interest. It will also be wrong to say that it has never happened in the past but now it is so naked that even an average reader or viewer can also sense it. Few recent examples : Open magazine owned by Rahejas sacked it's political editor for a series of writeups done by him and were not appreciated by the politicians he criticised. The Hindu lost it's first professional editor and CEO as they fell victim to owners' manoeuvres. Loksabha elections around the corner, suddenly channels started showing long public speeches of certain politician, newspapers giving extraordinary coverage to few politicians, what is known as paid news. So in case if people are asking that media has become a kind of Trojan horse put by today's Kings and their henchman in public domain, seems to be true.

There were days, when journalism used to be activism but that was for public cause, journalism is still activism but largely for vested interest groups. Rather than a activist, journalist has taken a new avatar , now he is like other employee. In the panel discussion Kumar Ketkar, editor Divya Bhaskar raised a very important point. He said that present crisis of journalism is a reflection of the current crisis of Indian and global capitalism. the capitalist class ownership profile has changed since 1960s and 70s. Foreign financial institutions started targeting control of middle class investment which was small in 70s. That was the time when even a textile mill owner could have own and run a paper. Today journalism business has become shopping mall culture.

The very fact is that many channels and publications are bleeding financially but the owners who started them to protect their business interest keep them alive. If you threadbare the real owners behind most of the channels and publications, you will find Marans, Ambanis, Goenkas, Birlas and their likes behind the scene.

In such a scenario , you may ask when the majority of media is controlled by capitalists, politicians and paid news wallahs, whether there is any hope for dissemination of truth. My answer is a big yes. It is just because the social media has provided a very potent and low cost platform for opinion building. Today even the journalists working in vested interest publications secretly use social media platform. Whenever a crisis comes, even an average reader goes on social media to reach the lower layer of news. Probably this is the secret of unprecedented success of Aam Admi Party in Delhi Assembly Election, most of the media had written this party off before the election, the entire campaign of this party run on social media, and it changed the mindset of Delhites.

In fact, I recollect when last time I visited Nuseum, the Museum of News in Washington DC, I saw an interesting signage there almost in the last leg of Museum tour, indicating a finger pointing to the visitor ' You the Journalist '. So despite of all efforts by politicians, industrialists, capitalists and other vested interest holders truth can not be suppressed.