Was busy in some important work these days! Yes! This was the only excuse I gave to all my friends who kept asking where I was all these days, and why I discontinued writing this blog.
Well, civic body elections are scheduled in my city and journalists are busy in ‘various’ types of work. As a local daily, my newspaper is also taking out special pull out pages, fondly called as advertorials, and frankly called as paid news. Being a part of news room, I am deployed to make pages, compose the data of ‘achievements’ and highlight it on the page using as many ways (tricks, in fact) I know. I am getting handsome amount for that, no doubt. In corporate, they use the term remuneration or compensation for the payment. I think, ‘compensation’ is the most suitable term for the money I am receiving to compose the paid news. Compensation for the compromise I am making with my journalistic ethics.
Well, I am very new. Who taught me about the ethics? The books and the universities! But, life outside the books is different. Does it become ethics just because it is quoted in the books? Or it become ethics because the great elders practiced it in their era? If change is the most constant phenomenon, ethics may also witness the change. So, is it the new form of ethics? Praising someone ‘in newspaper’ for money? Is it journalism or its mockery?
Good or bad, but the change is here and there is no doubt about it. The ‘Mahavishnu of Mount Road’, even if being a ‘Bhishma Pitamaha’ of the ethical journalism, is facing stings of arrows from the so called unethical ‘marketing’ tactics of the corporate news house. “They are not doing press. They are doing cheap marketing,” one of the visitors from Chennai, who was brought up with The Hindu, expressed while we were having discussion just after Times Group’s entry in Chennai. Almost three months have passed after this discussion, and now the television advertisement war has begun. To The Times of India’s offensive commercial, The Hindu retaliated with some exclusive punch lines doing justice with its age and dignity. The bottom-line of this war is the same. What is the real journalism? What is the real ethics? Are they changing?
If the journalism of courage or journalism that speaks straight-forward truth, being non-favouring and non-bias is the ethical journalism; then people, be ready to pay twenty-five rupees a day for a newspaper. In today’s era, media is no more neutral. It shouldn’t be – as it meant to stand for the right. But, being with the right every time, may invite troubles, the deadly troubles. And in today’s age of growth and money, how many of us could take up troubles?
The age, where even the pious work of imparting education has become money-making business; and where they charge class-wise money for the Darshan of the almighty in a gold-plated temple; how one could expect a small newspaper shouting only for the principles – for the ethics!
Exactly, here lies the root cause. Ethics are missing from every field, basically, from people. Principles are missing from our hearts. If most of us understand that the paid news is unethical; why politicians insist to publish it by paying even more money than the advertisement charges? (Just because they know that it influences mindsets of their voters). If someone says, cheap marketing tactic is not the Press; and all of us nod affirmatively to his statement; then why the newspaper doing the same is posing a threat to the ancient and ethical newspaper? (Because people are purchasing it to see nude photographs of women)
Ethics are as it is. But they have lost their position. Now, ethics exist in mouth, not in mind. Because, we – the people; allowed them to leave our minds.
We can change it, too. Mind it.
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