Bhubaneswar: Odisha Governor Prof. Ganeshi Lal on Tuesday called on the media to curb the menace of fake news. Decoding the meaning and role of media, he said, media is similar to meditation – mindless agitation. He was addressing the closing ceremony of the three-day 5th National Media Conclave-2021 virtually.
Media is a watchdog and has a key role to play in the vibrant democracy of India. The government has focused on citizen-centric communication in a language they understand through various platforms they access, be it TV news, radio, social media or online digital media, he said, adding that legendary sages like Adikavi Valmiki, Vyasa, Swami Vivekananda among others have contributed a lot to the world literature due to media and meditation.
Journalist and Founding Editor of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) P. Sainath spoke about the state of media in the country and how it has changed over time. “Indian media is politically free but imprisoned by profit. The crisis facing organised journalism is more fundamentally a revenue problem. There is a huge distinction between media and journalism. Corporations have made this distinction for me. There was a time when media and journalism meant the same thing. Now, there has been a shift in the moral universe of the journalists. Media is a business…journalism is a calling. The death of journalism has come with hyper commercialism. The mainstream media now has turned into a dominant media due to corporatisation,” he said.
He also recounted the contribution of Raja Ram Mohan Ray, Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh and Dr BR Ambedkar to the cause of Indian journalism. He said it is a matter of regret that contemporary news organisations are completely controlled by corporate entities that go only by profit figures. He cited the instance of the media’s pandemic coverage that was completely sugar-coated and one-sided. He also expressed his concern over India’s growing economic disparity and said India’s dollar billionaires increasing while the
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