Apps
Contact
Seminars
RSS FeedMay 7th, 2009
Thank God!
Certainly this is a scary situation for *anyone*, but the story of a 3-year-old boy missing for 2 days found alive is so positive and uplifting that it only appears as a testimony to the human spirit. It is remarkable that a boy who only had T-shirt, sneakers and a pull-up diaper did so well in spring cool weather (low 50s) with no food and water for two days.
May God bless the child with good health and a long life.
December 14th, 2008
BBC (Biased Broadcasting Corporation)
Apparently, it turns out, when I slammed BBC last week I was not alone. Rather, I was in distinguished company. Well-known thinker and editor-in-chief of Covert magazine, MJ Akbar has slammed BBC in even more stringent terms. My list of grievances with BBC has went past the levees, and I have dropped it from my bookmarks. Guardian it is for now, for the British source of news.
December 8th, 2008
BBC’s anti-India bias
Despite its best attempts, BBC has never been a neutral media outlet. Observer (observer.guardian.co.uk) has published a detailed report that confirms that one of terrorists who killed 160+ people in Mumbai on Nov 26th is indeed from Pakistan. Here is the link to their website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/07/mumbai-terrorism-india-pakistan1. The article also tells that this person’s parents were led away by the authorities about a week ago.
BBC has only published a one page on Pakistan’s scepticism to whether or not this terrorist is from Pakistan. Here is the relevant link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7757871.stm. It is difficult to believe that BBC does not have access to the same investigative reports that Observer and MSNBC have as it has one of the largest networks inside Pakistan.
No wonder that BBC has lost ground to Observer and other news sources over these years.
September 8th, 2007
Why I think Telegraph India is a dumb newspaper
Here I was, trying to find the India Japan game in the Asia Cup semi final. When I go to TelegraphIndia.com, here are the first 5 news it shows in the sports section:
- No change in Team India’s seven-batsman formula
- Sachin awaits crowning glory
- Dravid eyes a perfect finish
- Moores upbeat on Flintoff
- THE ENFANT TERRIBLE (About Shoib Akhtar)
Further, there is NO WAY to navigate to the hockey news. How can a person who is even mildly interested in hockey read hockey news?
News websites often claim they can only highlight what readers are interested in. However the reverse is much more forced: the readers can only be interested in things that they are aware of.
So, the news websites at least have to make all news available. Then, as readers read some news more than others, the news website can choose to prioritize them.
June 14th, 2007
Media – Socially Responsible or not?
This morning I received an email forward, the essence of the email can be found in this link: “Of Stars and Martyrs, Munnabhai vs. Manish Pitambare”.
Even after leaving any aspect of nationalism and patriotism out of it, I think the media started shedding its social responsibilities long time ago.
Media moghuls generally give a reason that media only prints what people want to read. This is not entirely correct. Actually, the converse is much more true. People can only read what is published. From whatever is published, people read different articles with different degrees of interest (this is captured as the “hits” on that story). Then, from within stories read by people, media editors establish trends and use that to report further news. Once the trends are established, they are being continuously revalidated simply because only a certain number of stories are published. The people who read the news that did not fall within the selected trends, must also read the news from within trends.
Some news stories are inherently juicier than the others. So they invariably get more hits. For example, Brangelina stories get more hits than the deaths of soldiers and civilians in Iraq. So media may say that it is only a numbers game. If so, then we can safely say that media is only a commercial enterprise. We should all then agree that it has no more social responsibility than another commercial enterprise, such as Coke or Philip Morris.
If, on the other hand, media assumes any social responsibility, it must also answer why it chose one news story over the other, and it cannot simply use the “popularity” as an answer.