Trimming the burgeoning negative media

Like many, a former president of India, once raised a question. "Tell me, why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognise our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?" If we try to find out the answer of the above concern, the media is too concentrated, too few people own too much. There are really a few companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It's not healthy. We have to do more than keep media giants from growing larger; they're already too big. We need a new set of rules that will break these huge companies to pieces. The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. I usually hear many allegations against the media. Here we are in the 21st centuries when everything really is horrible and it really stinks. The mass media, everything on television everything everywhere is just rotten. You know it's just really boring and really evil, ugly and worse. I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests. Some people think maybe since there isn't a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don't understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out. In fact, there are a lot of things and in order to be at the top and maintain your focus you have to have something that motivates you. For me, it was what I perceived as a lack of respect from the boxing world as well as the media, which made me want to work so hard and be great. We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. These days politics, religion, media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over. I'm always told that what I say is controversial. Why is it controversial? There are so many streams of media now, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there are just millions of voices and people wanting to be heard. For an example, I am disappointed to learn from the media that the International Crimes Tribunal asked an English daily editor to explain some parts of a recent report on the tribunal while the tribunal issued a rule asking Editor, Publisher and Reporter to explain by October 23 why contempt proceedings should not be initiated against them. The tribunal observed that certain parts of a report titled 'A crucial period for International Crimes Tribunal' run by the daily on October 1 tarnished the image of the court. The media coverage is praiseworthy and raised pertinent questions on ethics and its role in a democratic society. Every piece of information - authentic or otherwise - was discussed in agonising detail as well as in the field of investigation. Even now many TV channels have not taken the story off their menu. The media today claim unbriddled rights over the lives and privacy of the common man. The sinister role played by some TV channels in conducting dirty trials daily is deplorable. It is a shame that the some quarters have fooled by the perpetrators of the crime. There is hardly any reason to claim that journalism in Bangladesh, be it print, electronic or online, maintains, at all times, the highest professional and ethical standards. In fact, one malaise that affects journalism in the country is a distorted form of embedded journalism in which many journalists and institutions covertly and overtly represent the interest of political parties, virtually operating as their public relations outlet. On the other hand, there is also hardly any reason to believe that, when politicians, while in power, are critical of the 'professional ethics' of journalists, are critical of their 'inability to take criticism for their wrongdoing', it somehow stems from a genuine concern for journalism. Politicians, when in opposition, continuously refer to various news items in the media to back their point of views on the state of the country's affairs, and when in power, they castigate the media for publishing news and information that are critical of the government or reflect its failures. The recent criticism by a number of ruling party members, including the prime minister herself, of the apparent conduct of the media, seems to stem from just that. When we, through our educational culture, through the media, through the entertainment culture, give our children the impression that human beings cannot control their passions, we are telling them, in effect, that human beings cannot be trusted with freedom. Neither science, nor the politics in power, nor the mass media, nor business, nor the law nor even the military are in a position to define or control risks rationally. If we interviewed 100 politicians and asked about whether the media's too soft or too hard, about 99 would say too hard. We need to police ourselves in the media. The writer can be reached at email: gopalsengupta@aol.com