Who Actually Killed Journalism?

Politicians might stifle, corporates might encage, but the viewer wields the remote.

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Sensationalism flourishes because we watch, while journalists pursuing inconvenient truths-from Gauri Lankesh to Mukesh Chandrakar give their lives.

Democracy has been envisioned as a house with four sturdy pillars-the legislature, executive, judiciary, and the press. But take a close look at that fourth pillar today and it does not look like stone anymore. It appears chipped, weak, and has at least several shivering bricks left. The illusion of a free press remains, but in truth, much of it is tied in the tight grip of corporatization and political patronage.

Within every newsroom are reporters who wish to report on the stories of hunger in the backlands, on the abuse of workers, on the corruption in contracts, and on lives upended by war. But too many of them have their pencils blunted by unseen censors-advertisers, owners, or politicians. What gets lost is not simply "news" but the very air that sustains a democracy.

Independent journalism struggles to be that oxygen mask when the room is choking. It releases the reporter from accountability to shareholders and enables them instead to be accountable to society. But such independence's survival hinges on readers and viewers-readers who baulk at paying a few rupees for a newspaper, while casually splurging hundreds on a single cup of coffee. If truth is not worth the cost of loose change, how long will truth last?

The TRP Irony: Who Actually Determines the News?

It has become chic to deride the media by claiming: "They only chase TRP." Stop for a moment and wonder-who provides TRP? Not satellites, not sponsors, not some secret machinery-it is people. When a shout-fest in prime time is watched by record ratings, when a celebrity scandal is read more than a farmer's suicide, it is the audience that determines what "leads."