Nov 15, 2006 11:57 AM
5700 Views
My thoughts are about overall media coverage in our country(Print and TV) and not India today
Scenario One:
Subject-1:India Adobe’s CEO’s son kidnapped: News is out in few minutes, all channels beam it as breaking news, some channels ask people to visit website and pray for boy’s return.
Subject-2:4 Dalits of one family brutally gang raped and murdered: It made to TV channels after 45 long days that too when Nagpur was burning and curfew imposed due to voilent protest. Upper caste men killed two males and dragged two girls to an isolated place and gang raped for several hours and finally murdered them. The only survivor lodged complaint but was repelled away by the local police.
Scenario Two
Subject-1:AIIMS is hit by dengue, few 10s of people die out of the disease. The media covered it as if our country is going to hit by big epidemic.
Subject-2:More than 300 kids have died in Ghorakpur dist due to encephalitis, no media coverage and TV channels have no clue of this.
These two scenarios show the way our country is split between class, the rich and famous get great attention while the poor get nothing, our media is very sensitive to rich and the famous and doesn’t play any role to expose the problems plaguing our rural world. With such split clearly visible for large poor population of our country, the things will get more messier b’cos the naxal movement is catching up in a big way than ever before. The naxal head count is getting bigger by passing days and at the same time we have a class of people minting crores without shedding a single drop of sweat at Dalal street. TV channels have lots of time to beam Abhishek-Aish stories but don’t have time for our rural folks.
Why can’t our country share the wealth it has in an equitable way? We have world class cities with world class facilities like clubs, swimming pools, schools.etc. But nothing for our rural folks, they get lots of attention during elections and later they re dumped off. With such class differentiation our country will have a ’red’ governament soon and all the rich will be shaken off and their wealth will be distributed among the poor class.
If our media doesn’t change their style of working, media would be the single reason for the split in our society.
Ilyas Mohamud,
Bangalore
