Live Chat on Mainstream Media and Prejudices

Same as Anupam here. On a trip, but love to hear about the discussion.

Hello Mr.Bhagwat,
i’d like to take part into the “Live chat” which is to take place tom.

Thanks
Ajitabh DAS

1.the efforts in the net,twitter,facebook are not coordinated and dont have critical mass.Pls show me anyone on the right having the number of followers as sashi tharoor or virsanghvi.Each Individual with couple of hundreds or thousands are scattered around in the net.Every body has to be interlinked.Donot even have one single decent place where we can read all the “right” content which is scattered around.
2.No serious effort on book publication(especialy regional languages) and visual communication/documentories(comparatively inexpensive /distrubtion with cds/dvds,youtube),Films(agree expensive).Younger generation does not know a thing about ,shaymaprasda mukherji,Kahmir pundits etc…Youngsters do not know the history, which with years of left academic tinkering has been distorted unrecognizably.
3.Can we have monuments/archives on “unforgettable pages of indian history which seculars are trying to erase”? Monuments /archives real(expensive)/digital(not that expensive) on Emergency/Kasmir pundit migration/Sikh riots/Bhopal gas leak etc?.
4.need a media audit org which monitors and regularly point out media lapses.agreed some individual sites like you, here and there are doing some good work ,But this should be organized and systematic with monthly news letters and follow up action with editors guild etc. the content should also be regularly published with own website.
a la http://www.newsbusters.org.
5.Getting in to TV is frightfully expensive .So will have to find ways to communicate through mobile phone which almost every indian has.How to get text or voice or mms in all languages to all those phones regularly?.
if we crack this we will get the reach.
6.Speech circuit- We do not have a pro speech circuit.Have to develop(This a biz idea also)a agency/speech circuit by which right wing leaders can address different sections of the society.we have get in to organizations /industry bodies/societies/clubs/biz schools etc.
7.All the news is there.But the editors do not give prominence to “right” kind of news.So we need to find our news and link to it.
we need a Indian Drudge.
This is not the complete solution but can be a beginning.

Have you seen this news item about the gruesome act of chopping off hands for the alleged vilification of the Prophet in the mainstream media or 24×7 TV channels ?

http://dailypioneer.com/267070/Kerala-prof-hand-chopped-off-for-%E2%80%98vilifying%E2%80%99-Prophet.html

Hi Shantanu,

It was a nice chat, though I felt bad that I had to get off the last 20 minutes because of connectivity issues. The purpose of this mail is two-fold. One is to provide you with some links of how I try to do my bit in trying to expose the media. Second is to discuss some observations on alternate media.

I have written 8 letters so far to the Editors Guild complaining (and also suggesting alternatives) on how various coverage issues (parliament, BT summits, loose use of “India” etc). Rajdeep even replied to a couple of them, infact accepting that the media erred once and was not upfront in accepting it. All posts are here, please take a look when you are free 🙂 http://serious–fun.blogspot.com/search/label/Editors%20Guild

I have also documented, in 6 blog posts, my various interactions with journolists from MSM. I titled them “Trysts with MSM”. All of them have clearly exposed the lack of common sense in most of them. Posts here: http://serious–fun.blogspot.com/search/label/Trysts%20with%20MSM

Also, for the past 4 years, I have been writing a weekly blog post summarizing the past week’s happenings. Like you were mentioning in the discussion today, I think it is important to spread information on current affairs to friends. For the past 4 years, I have been writing a weekly summary of happenings around and sending to them. Only last year, I have started putting that column on my blog too. For reference the link is here: http://serious–fun.blogspot.com/search/label/Weekly

Another observation I have made is that students are woefully unaware of what’s happening around (not just politics, but current happenings in Science, policy, economics etc). I have just begun an effort to teach some students on current happenings in approaches that will make it interesting. It is an experiment I am doing, so let’s see how it goes 🙂

This was the second online discussion on how to counter the media. Also have been having some offline dicussions with other folks, and the common consensus seems to be that “we” need a new channel/newspaper etc. What I generally observed is that there is a lot of rhetoric around (plus there is a lot of negativity around too). People generally tend to vent out their frustration with undesirable language, and then vent out grand plans with no concrete action plan in mind (one such example was a when a fellow tweeter wanted to start a campaign against NDTV and make it a trending topic without any idea on how to do it!).

Most importantly, I feel people are becoming very impatient. Expecting instant results when dealing with our media is equivalent to hoping A.Raja will accept that he indeed committed a fraud :).

Hence my liking towards bloggers like yourself, CBCNN, offstumped etc, because you guys argue with specific arguments which will put them in a dock. I think we should first ask people to follow this process – tweet by tweet, article by article, blog by blog, show by show – to counter the media’s propangda. Any discussion veering towards alternative media gets very rhetorical. It is impossible to have a single alternative media – someone or the other will be dis-satisfied with that too, and the cycle goes on.

I believe it is important for us to urge people to be specific in their criticism and directly engage with editors in sane language (because media has this tendency to generalize 1 or 2 abusive messages) I believe that the beginning has been very good, and it is just a matter of time when the alternate view is more actively projected at the national level. In the meanwhile, we should not miss the forest for the trees.

It’s been a long mail, will end it here 🙂

Regards,
Sudhir

PS: Last link – have a blogpost which has 2 questions that I have asked for 100 days to NDTV, and got no response. http://serious–fun.blogspot.com/2010/06/hundred-day-questions.html