It’s over two and a half years since this blog
started. It is with a sense of happiness and satisfaction that I note this blog
crossed One Million views on October
16.2012. For a small blog in some corner of the world I consider it a decent
accomplishment. I would consider it an even greater accomplishment if it
manages to push many more to write. I have, of course, been inspired by many
wonderful writers on the net; writers whose names would make a very long list.
They aren’t from the regular media. All of them had something in common which I
learned: They weren’t just bold, but in
writing, they were never afraid of being wrong, they took the opportunity to
say what they believed or assessed to be right. In this post I will share a
few personal notes.
Like many, I have observed news media for a long
time, national and some international. It was a thrill to see TV news channels
adopt a strong adversarial role with the govt in the late 90s. It was only in 1999 during the Kandahar episode that I felt something wasn’t really right. Then, it
was in 2002 during and after the
Gujarat riots that I sensed the channels had gone far beyond reporting. They
were actually concocting lies and fake stories. Naturally, most of it was quite
shocking and disturbing. Program after program reported over 2000 deaths, 3000
deaths, mass rapes, foetuses ripped apart with no authentic evidence for
anything. By 2004 it was pretty much
clear that these news channels were not in the news business but in politics. Some
NGOs joined hands with the media too. People we thought were social activists
were actually “paid political
hacktivists”.
I had a TV in a small office from where my partner
and I operated an online business. I was mostly alone in the office and hardly
watched but had the sound on to catch any sensible news. Then we got to watch
the Cash4Votes in 2008 and that too
brought outrage but passed. That year the US presidential election was also interesting
with the possibility of a black man becoming a president for the first time. So
that got a lot of attention. It was soon after that election, on November 26, that late at night I
caught some report on terrorist attacks in Mumbai. This went on and on and I
watched till 4am next morning before quitting. At home next morning I thought
it would all be over but when I got back to office I saw things had gotten
worse. On the evening of November 27 I tried calling a TV channel at least 3
times to complain about their terrible coverage of the attacks but couldn’t get
through. In the following months I watched the Chetanya Kunte–Barkha Dutt episode over “shoddy journalism” on the net and that was disgusting to say the least.
It was evident that media celebs had a clear contempt for social media and
bloggers.
In March 2009 I registered the website MediaCrooks.Com but still didn’t write
for a long time. At first we wanted to focus on the ‘financial’ channels but then the stock markets had already crashed
since October 2008 and there wasn’t much to write. There were many blogs and
sites that wrote about politics, religion, history, ideology etc; most of them
great ones. Thus the thought of writing about news channels and only about news
channels, be it print or electronic. I had no idea what to write other than
what would read like complaint letters to a newspaper. The other idea was to
write “reviews” of programs but that would have sounded like movie critics. The
first post was made on February 2010 and for about 9 months there was hardly
any readership for the site. I recall the readership count till November 2010
was around 400 or thereabouts.
It was then on November
18, 2010 that Radiagate broke
and when Open magazine crashed, this site carried all the tapes in a single
file without interruption. Since then there has been steady increase in
readership. MediaCrooks is intended to be a critique of media without meaning
to be merely a serious academic exercise. Without sacrificing accuracy and
facts it was always and still is meant to be fun-reading.
Among many stories that inspire, one is definitely the
story of Bob Woodward (Of Watergate). People may or may not know
but Woodward was sent to cover the hearing of the Watergate burglary not
because he was a great journalist but because he was an average journalist. His
supervising editor even referred to him as a “Schmuck” who could have been fired. Even his newspaper, Washington Post, had initially considered
Watergate just an ordinary burglary which is why they sent a ‘schmuck’. The
rest is history. Their meticulous research and inquiries should have inspired
many of our real journalists. They didn’t use call-girls, prostitutes and
spy-cameras for “sting” operations or entrapment. Does it sound a lot like our
very own J. Gopikrishnan of 2G fame?
I also rely on the P&G principle: “Facts count, Opinions don’t. What is
right is more important than who is”. Even in medical situations an opinion
is usually a ‘considered assessment’.
In the current context the media will have us
believe that corruption fighters like Anna
Hazare or Arvind Kejriwal have
come up because politicians have become unaccountable or have decimated our
institutions. Only partly true. This is an outrageous half-truth that is being
spread. Their spurious argument is that these activists have taken the place of
the Opposition in a democracy. This is as far from the truth as Russian is from
Tamil. These activists have come up because our media has failed. Our media has
stopped being a watchdog. Whatever IndiaToday unearthed about Khurshid may
have been possible with all other scams too. Our media failed. Whatever other
scams were unearthed by CAG could have been done by the media too. How many
times have media used RTI to expose govt misdeeds? Why should a country
even need specialist “RTI activists”
as they call them? If a small journal like The Pioneer and J. Gopikrishnan
could expose the 2G scam what does it say about other news media with greater
muscle and influence?
Far from exposing, many in the news media have, in
fact, been operating as defence lawyers for the criminals in the govt and
politics. With most media celebs
swarming around NCR like insects attracted to the honeypot, they fail to
acknowledge most crimes have happened right under their own noses. Much of
the news media is also now a “political party” that is part of the crime. The
anti-corruption activists have replaced not politicians or Oppositions but the
news media which is too busy with Bollywood, Saas-Bahu stories, silly
Cricketainment and Tamasha in general. At a time like this investigative
journalism should have peaked but in India it’s practically dead. That is why I consider a corrupt media the
first and biggest threat to our democracy more than politicians.
Many posts on MediaCrooks have been based on readers’
comments. Many have come through emails that I receive. Where possible they
have been acknowledged. There are many individuals who have recommended the
blog through Twitter, Facebook, SocialMedia forum and even in private circles.
Many SM sites have reproduced posts from here. There are professional online
news sites that have used content from here. Even IAC has prominently featured
some posts on their site. I would love to thank every individual and entity
that helped to spread the blog and its message. Naming each of them would make
a very long list and run into many posts long.
I would just
like to thank all of you for reading and for supporting this site. It is
more than I ever expected. I also hope many more such sites come up and many
more write about issues that concern all of us in general.
