Zainab Rauf
The contagion of fake and biased news has gripped India with all its might. Gone are days when a journalist had the freedom to pen down their thoughts and publish real news fearlessly.
As media in India grows into an economic giant, clocking double-digit growth annually, and matching the economic size of many individual industries, journalists are being obliged to bow down to their power possessors and media houses.
A real news does not even find a column in the newspapers today.
Pertinently the growth of the Indian Media industry has largely been at the behest of media power-holders rubbing shoulders with top-level politicians, industrialists, and corporate lobbyists.
This has not only allowed media power-holders to attain immense financial power and market standing for their media companies but also led to public perceptions of politics, electoral outcomes, policy decisions, and social happenings, etc. to be formed according to exactly what the top-level politicians, industrialists, and corporate lobbyists want.
Thus, we can confidently assume that majority of big media channels do not have the freedom to run neutrally and are obliged to lean towards a political party.
In fact, we can re-word this assumption to: every political party in India owns a media channel that praises them and supports their decisions even when they are wrong.
India’s media can’t speak truth to power. However, there are numerous journalists who have made their mark in the field of journalism to maintain not only the quality, reliability, authenticity, diversity, and pluralism, of reporting but also sustain the basic norms of responsible journalism.
One such journalist we can’t forget is Shujaat Bukhari, a prominent Kashmiri journalist and the founding editor of Rising Kashmir, a Srinagar based newspaper.
Shujaat was shot dead outside his office in the Press Enclave area of Srinagar on June 14, 2018, after surviving three previous assassination attempts.
This brings us to question the price our journalists have to pay for speaking the truth and for bringing the truth to the fore.
Why does truth come at any human cost? from our journalists being tortured, harassed, and even arrested for doing their work, who should take the onus, when everyone is busy passing the buck?
How much should our journalists risk for informing the public with the truth? Why are our democratic institutions failing to keep people in power accountable? Why does India, ‘the largest democracy’ in the world, falling two positions down to rank 140th in the 2019 World Press Freedom Index not ring a huge alarm?