“We live in the times of post-truth when moderation is a crime and the latest victim was veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari, who was killed in Srinagar a few days ago, as he opted for a moderate stance,” the founder chairman of the Media Development Foundation and the Asian College of Journalism Sashi Kumar has said.
He was inaugurating a seminar on ‘Television in Post- Truth India,’ organised by the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy on Saturday to launch a five-day workshop.
Mr. Sashi Kumar said that post-truth was positioned as oppositional to the mainstream media and it functioned as an ideological and political device to challenge what the latter purveyed as the truth.
‘Leap into the unknown’
He added that the concept of post-truth was a “quantum leap into the unknown to challenge the known”.
“It remains a threat, not just to our understanding of normative trust, but to facts before us and scientific terms of empirical evidence. As we move along an age of polarisations and extremities, moderation becomes a crime. Shujaat Bukhari, who was a voice of moderation in Jammu and Kashmir, was a victim of the evolving scenario. Journalists Gouri Lankesh and Santanu Bhownik were others,” he said.
The veteran journalist also said that idea of post-truth was being used to counter the concepts of democratic norms, civilisation, humaneness, justice and equity, and all of these being reported and discussed in the mainstream media. “Someone who wants to sabotage the foundations of contemporary civilisation will throw in the concept of post-truth. The truth in a consensual and democratic manner does not matter for them, but the post-truth does,” Mr. Sashi Kumar.
Film critic C.S. Venkiteswaran said the mainstream media have gradually become ‘brokers’ between the global capital and the administration in the post-modern society.
C. Gouridasan Nair, Resident Editor, The Hindu , moderated the seminar. Senior journalists Sunnykutty Abraham, Neelan, M. Vijayakumar, academy secretary Mahesh Panju and deputy director (programmes) N.P. Sajeesh spoke.
