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Panel Discussion on "Paid News" - Who will Watch the Watchdog? on Thursday, 2nd September, 2010 at 6.30 pm |
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It was a cool evening and the end of the day traffic in Bangalore was creating the usual jams all around the arterial roads in the city. Yet a sizeable crowd of eminent citizens and young students of media and journalism gathered at the auditorium of Bangalore International Centre (BIC) to listen to Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and four other prominent journalists of Bangalore on “Paid News- Who Will Watch the Watchdog”- a debate which was organized on Thursday, 2nd Sept, 2010 by BIC.
They were not disappointed. In a scintillating talk, laced with wit and humour, Paranjoy did a clinical analysis about the way the “Paid News” phenomenon crept into the print media and how over the years it has now assumed such proportions that commercial considerations now far outweigh the editorial policy and contents of both print and visual media. The audience heard with amazement and horror how individual derelictions from journalistic ethics of earlier days have now got converted into institutional corruption through “private treaties”, acquisition of shares etc and how the system has now got linked up with political corruption since the last General Election. The Press Council of India, the watchdog of the Print Media, had set up a sub-committee to examine and report on this phenomenon last year. The sub-committee, of which Paranjoy was a member, submitted a meticulously- researched report which the PCI decided to bury as it revealed too many inconvenient truths. Possibly this weak decision came out of the realization that the august body did not really have any penal authority.
The other panelists- Mr. Suresh Menon, Dr. Poornima, Mr. Trilochan Sastry- and the moderator, Dr. Ashwin Mahesh fully agreed with Paranjoy and added their own pithy comments. To Suresh Menon, the nexus between politicians and the media barons was qualitatively not different from “match-fixing” in cricket. Dr. Poornima observed that currently the Marketing Manager is above the Editor in the print media and he usually has the last word on what should finally find place in the newspaper.
Yet the picture was not all bleak. To the lament of a veteran amongst the audience as to whether everybody in the media has lost his/her soul and do not see anything positive in the country, all the panelists, including Paranjoy, asserted that there were still a few journalists and media chiefs who are frank and fearless and who disseminate news and views as they ought to be disseminated. There were several interesting suggestions to reverse the disturbing “paid news” system, one of them being to have an independent publicly- funded corporation to disseminate news and without any corporate linkage whatsoever. Many also wondered whether the Press Council of India- The toothless Tiger which can not even whimper- could be sufficiently strengthened with statutory penal powers and also made more representative. In the meanwhile the struggle of the independent journalists must go on. Paranjoy assured everyone that he would go on irrespective of any obstacles and that his blood- group was “B- Positive”. The audience gave him a resounding applause.
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