The new Chairman of the Press Council of India, Markandey Katju, wants to make it an instrument of mediation in addition to adjudication. THE appointment of Justice Markandey Katju, a former judge of the Supreme Court, as Chairman of the Press Council of India is about the best thing that has happened to that body in a long while. It is no exaggeration to say that the PCI commands little prestige...
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Advertisers oppose broadcasters' TRP proposal by Viveat Susan Pinto
In a face-off between advertisers and news broadcasters over the issue of the periodicity of reporting Television Rating Points, the former has opposed the broadcasters’ proposal to have TRPs of shows move from a weekly to a monthly format. The News Broadcasters Association (NBA) last week had issued a letter to TAM, the body that measures television viewership in India, asking it to consider the option of reporting TRPs of programmes...
More »‘Murdochisation' of the Indian media by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Alice Seabright
Its facets include concentration of media ownership and the transformation of news into a commodity. THE last two decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation of India's ‘mediascape' – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the United States, to describe how visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. While there...
More »The Battle for Land: Unaddressed Issues by Avinash Kumar
The episodes of violence in land acquisition by the government, as witnessed recently in Bhatta-Parsaul in Uttar Pradesh and in other states earlier, occur because patterns of violence are inbuilt into the process. Despite a bill pending in Parliament since 2007, there has been little effort by political parties to evolve a consensus on acquisition of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes. The law as at present and also the provisions...
More »The ‘Radia’ctive Indian Media by Satya Sagar
There has been a gross simplification of the issues involved in the exposures in the Radia tapes on the lack of integrity among mediapersons. In order to understand how exactly journalists really function it is necessary to understand the overall context in which they operate and clarify some of the persistent myths about what the profession is all about. Four myths in particular need to be dissected: That it enjoins...
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