Perceived Media Gap: The Growth of GODI Media

This article addresses the major concerns related to growing incompetency of today's media. It is very worrisome that India dropped off to 142nd position in World Press Freedom Index, 2020. This article tries to highlight different areas of problem and also strives to come up with remedies. 

Fourth pillar of democracy, Media, is on the verge of epidemic malady. Oh well, this is not the fact which is left untouched, quite possibly every attentive individual may be getting this notion. But this article may bring to you the other side of this defect which is owing its origin from the debris of degrading media. As rightly marked by David Sarnoff that, "Competition brings out the best in product but worst in people", and what we are witnessing is rear end of this phrase. In the race of bringing the news first unto the viewers, the Media is loosing its objectivity. In the contestation to meet their rapacious appetite what Media is doing is tampering with evidences. Media hitherto was working for the good of Nation but at present it is working to enlist maximum possible expediency. What is worst but noteworthy is that there exists a venture in which the State and the Media collaborate to make people ignorant and heedless about the real happenings. 

What Media should really does is opinion making. And there is no problem in that until the personal opinion doesn't intrude. If the happenings around nation is fed as real as it is then there is no objections, but it comes under the contempt when others' considerations are imposed over people. People shall always have the reliable, quantifiable, precise and accurate content to manufacture their opinions. Any mala fide on the side of content creator will certainly have impact on the getter. And this deficiency surely lead to the lapse of imperative obligation which Media swear-in. A vow which have embodied the greater good of mass should never be rendered deception. 

There had been many attempts to put some reasonable regulations and limitations over Media through many legislations but all gone into vain. To name some of the post-independent regulations are - Young Person's(Harmful Publications)Act, 1956; Press Council of India Act, 1965; Cable Television Regulation Act, 1995. But none of them had that potency which was needed to restrict the foul acts of paid news and nexus with political parties, corporates and other such entities. None of the them were capable in keeping the decency, morality and ethics of Media intact.

Benjamin Disraeli had quoted appropriately that, "When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken".

Mistakes were made on both sides, by State and Media. But this does not mean that we should persist in those mistakes. Government, Media and Citizen should collaboratively strive to secure the very end for which they are meant and that is to get everyone out of misery and distress, alongside securing a decent well-being of people. And here I see that in his famous rhetoric piece 'tryst with destiny' our maiden Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, marked it rightly that, "The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and sufferings, so long our work will not be over."   

                                                  

Media should always be dispassionate. It serves as a link between state and its individuals and any default in this will surely channelize its way into delayed misery, which would be lethal. Media should always subserve its goal, which is to transmit the needs of the individuals to authorities, which on their turn needed to make endeavors for realization and accomplishment of that very need. Media is entrusted with the task of harbinger, and this harbinger needs to be neutral for the healthy play of democracy and any omission in this task would be considered deceitful. We are often called biggest democracy of world but this end shall remain unaccomplished until we comprehend that democracy is mere the play of numbers rather it is of mature contemplation. Well the process of getting media rid-off the errors is not scanty task, it will take its own course of time. But what we have to ensure is that the initiation and perpetual march toward our aim should never by hampered by any impediment. This process will be a steady one as no revolution has turned out overnight.

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