Are the media, the watchdog of democracy and public interest, turning traitors in contemporary India?
Yes, according to Sashi Kumar, columnist and media critic. Instead of speaking the truth to power, and fighting for the freedom of speech, the media has by and large was complicit in the ruling establishment's atrocities on democracy, Mr. Kumar noted.
At a seminar on ‘The media today: Fourth Estate or fifth column’ organised by the Centre for Research and Education for Social Transformation (CREST), Mr. Kumar alleged that most of the media, especially the visual media, revelled in defending the wrongdoings of the government.
“The media has capitulated to power,” he remarked. “It is doing exactly the opposite to what it should be doing.”
Traditionally, the role of the media was to be adversarial to power, to point out the chinks in the state's armour, and to criticise and challenge when the government goes off the track. But now the media was servile to power, and it sang paeans to the ruling class. “In television debates, there is no need for a BJP spokesperson any more—the anchor, who is expected to be neutral, was himself acting as the spokesperson for the BJP and the government,” he quipped.
Recalling that Indira Gandhi had declared Emergency that crippled press freedom and fundamental rights, there was at least one newspaper that strongly challenged her.
Now, though there was an ‘undeclared emergency' in force in the country, no media organisation was willing to challenge it.
He noted that Ms. Gandhi was instrumental in rooting secularism and socialism so firmly in the Constitution that it was now hard to remove them. But the irony was that there was no need to amend the Constitution now as the media was not challenging the demolition of the Constitution. “With a few honourable exceptions, the media has failed our Constitution,” he said.
