While the social media has provided an opportunity to challenge suppression of facts, what was lacking was powerful social organisations to create an alternative public sphere to undermine corporate control of information, said Professor Aijaz Ahmad.
“Such an alternative public sphere is there, in embryonic form, but the discrepancy between corporate power and opposition media is still so great as to be incalculable,” he said delivering the inaugural lecture, ‘Fact as Democratic Value’, to the 2015 batch of the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ).
‘Complex and contradictory reality’Evaluating the role of the social media vis-à-vis the corporate-owned media capable of bringing the most expensive and advanced hardware to the sites of news, the professor of political science said it had created a very complex and contradictory reality.
“On the one hand, a mere handful of corporations control perhaps as much as 90 per cent of information flows that are publicly and easily available — and which constantly invade our living spaces. On the other hand, the cheapening of the digital media and uploading facilities implies, at least in principle, that far more democratic means of production and circulation are now at hand.”
Prof. Ahmad told the students of journalism that while he had no reason to watch television channels, very few facts he used in his writings came now from big newspapers.
“I get most of my facts through alternative sources, mostly on the web or through direct communication on email, Skype and others who are also involved in the act of gathering the real truths of our time,” he said.
Likening the situation of journalists working for the corporate-owned media to Ernesto Che Guevara’s famous words uttered in the early days of the Cuban revolution, “you are inside the belly of the beast. You can kick harder,” he said, “You could kick harder or not. That will be your choice.”
“The task of a journalist is to doubt everything,” he told the journalism students. “If you don’t base your believing on doubt, if you do not seek satisfaction for your doubts, you have no sound basis for believing anything,” he added.
Prof. Ahmad said journalists “must discover the truths that the powerful conceal and then speak those truths to the people.”
“Facts become a democratic value only when they rub the government against its grain,” he said.
Sashi Kumar, chairman of the Media Development Foundation, presiding, introduced the speaker.
