Thursday, June 18, 2009

Mediocre Media

It has been quite sometime since I had blogged. I was looking for some interesting topic to post here. My last post evoked some interesting responses, especially, the comments on Madhavan. I was tempted to criticize Shahid Kapoor in this blog post, but since my post could disappoint his female fans, I refrained from doing so.

I was really annoyed by the news item that blocks half of the newspaper columns for the past few weeks. It’s about the racist attack on the Indians in Australia. True, some Australians have attacked Indian students and they suffered in that process. Do we need to react so much for that? This is very common in many parts of the world. Bad elements do exist in all the societies. In many cases the victims would be whites. How do the media know that the attacks were motivated by racist intentions? If Australians are racist, then why are they not attacking other Asian student communities? There are more than 100000 Chinese students studying in Australia. Why are they not being attacked? Why are they not protesting along with the Indian students?

If attacks on the foreigners can be termed as racist, then in India lot of foreigners are being mugged / beaten to death very frequently. Scarlett case is one such example. Did the western media term it as xenophobic?

The quality of journalism in the western world is much better compared to that of India. In BBC or CNN you can never notice a news reader airing his opinions on the subject. They bring in the expert to provide opinion. For ex, I was watching Sky news channel during the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. The terrorists targeted British and American citizens in that attack. In spite of that, the news readers were calm and composed. The newsreaders did not air their opinion. They had invited political and other experts from Asian region to understand the nature of the attacks and the people / organization behind the attacks.

Majority of the Indians are driven by emotions. Indian media tries to utilize this and sensationalize every news item. They just try to achieve higher TRP’s in this process. When people start losing interest in this news item they move on to the next news item for a few days. Don’t you think the Indian media needs to mature? Please leave your comments...