The opening session of a two-day national seminar on ‘New media and democracy in the post-truth era’ expressed concern over the drastic shift of the media from its objective role of depicting reality to a kind of prescriptive functioning with subjective preferences.
The seminar, organised by the Apex Council for Culture, urged people to be vigilant to the misuse of new media by right-wing forces to cover up truth and misinterpret facts to propagate their agenda.
Senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader M.A. Baby, who opened the seminar, said the main role of the new media in a democracy was to empower people by exploring the possibilities of technology. “However, the cherry-picking practices have unveiled the monstrous form of its functioning to make us think that seeing is not believing these days,” he said.
Mr. Baby said there should be a proper corrective mechanism at the national and State levels to ensure fair monitoring of the content by an experts’ panel in electronic, print and new media. He said a similar mechanism operational in the international arena was working well.
On intellectuals
In his keynote address, Sashi Kumar, media critic and chairman of Asian College of Journalism, said the replacement of public intellectuals with godmen, godwomen and film stars during discussions on social issues was one of the most disappointing trends in new media. “Public intellectuals are now an almost endangered species in our media with the marginalised public sphere dynamism in the era of post-truth,” he said.
“The concept of mass media too is not there now as fragmentation is visible with the de-massification trend. Making abnormal things normal is the most dangerous trend in this post-truth era led by proto-fascist ideas,” he said.
Writer Asokan Charuvil chaired the inaugural session. Apex Council for Culture secretary Prabhakaran Pazhassi, and writers C.P. Aboobacker and U. Hemanth Kumar spoke. Organisers said it was the first event hosted by the Apex Council for Culture, constituted under the Department of Culture, Government of Kerala.
