Indian Media: An Oxymoron

Media is the fourth pillar of democracy and rightly so because it has been bestowed with this superpower of making its voice heard. In other words, their ability to influence the masses. But with great power comes great responsibility and what we see today is media establishments have gone rogue, misusing their superpower.

The media is caught in this vicious cycle of TRPs, numbers. Which, with each turn, takes a toll on the ethics of journalism. The media businesses primarily earn through advertisements, of which the advertisements from both the state and central governments form a significant amount of total volume. There lies the vulnerability of media houses. To stay in the good books of the establishment, journalism went from keeping people informed to being a spokesperson of the political bosses. Many media businesses are owned by industrialists and directly or indirectly influence of what is published and what is not. It proves that something seriously is wrong with media because they are not self-sustaining, independent, and thus unfair and biased.

Keeping people "well" informed is what media does or at least should do. But instead of doing objective and point reporting, the media has switched to giving out spicy headlines with question marks at the end. The reporting has gone from stating facts to twisting facts to suit a specific narrative. Journalism gives voice to the weakest and the marginalized individuals; it starts a conversation and makes policymakers aware of real and burning issues. But lately, we see debates are held on trivial topics to create distractions from the real ones. It seems the media houses have locked themselves up in an echo chamber and have isolated themselves from the ground giving rise to what we now know as the post-truth world.

Media covers every spectrum of niches, but the irony is it is like a taboo for media houses to report on the press itself. Media acts as a watchdog for everyone, but there is no one to watch over them, and hence it can get away with all kinds of theatrics in the name of journalism. But when we see other democracies like the US, we find a healthy competition between different media houses contrary to India's situation where one tries to pull the other constantly. In the US, we also have different media houses taking forward a story broken by someone else instead of discrediting the story or claiming to have broken it first, which happens in India. The lack of gatekeeping and the rat race has led to the media losing its credibility. The thing with today's Indian media is an oxymoron in itself.

Something which should have been right has turned out precisely what's wrong with today's media. The strength of the media has been turned into its biggest weakness. It's no surprise the power turned weakness is the number game. While it is wholly justified to play the number game, the way it is being played is a severe concern.

To conclude what's right with today's Indian media is that they have started discussing what's wrong with them.

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