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India is finally seeing the birth of alternative journalism…….Rajeev Srinivasan
Some journalists get confused and start believing that they make the news, rather than just reporting it. This, and journalistic groupthink, has led to a skewed discourse: India’s supposed ‘centrists’ would be considered ‘far Left’ elsewhere. Their conventional wisdom is curiously anti-national as well.
“All the news that is fit to print” simply isn’t printed in India; only that news is printed which supports a particular viewpoint. Besides, those who do not toe the line are blackballed: you cannot get published. Several people have told me their personal experience of being excluded for their views.
This perverted system engenders a persistent anti-India bias in international media, too. When in India, foreign correspondents interact primarily with Delhi’s insular, incestuous sling-bag-wallah-journalist nexus that sneers at middle India; their endemic prejudices infect the foreigners too.
At least the Western media pays lip service to being non-judgmental. In India, there is an obvious industrialist-politician-journalist axis. They ‘manufacture consent’. But they were caught red-handed, Watergate-style, in the Radia tapes incident. Thereupon, the entire media closed ranks, and buried the story, hoping it would go away: this tactic has always worked in the past. Unfortunately for them, this time it didn’t work, because Internet readers, especially Twitterati (those using the Twitter social network), kept the issue alive.
Self-important scribes became concerned about their image on Twitter. When they were not given fawning adulation, they began abusing the Twitterati as cave-dwelling illiterates or “Internet Hindus”, showing their habitual scorn for the ‘little people’. One even threatened people with IPC 509, “insulting the modesty of a woman”, simply for questioning her dogmas.
But the Twitterati, mostly middle-class, urban, young, tech-savvy Indians, both in India and abroad, were not browbeaten, and responded in kind — and in this level-playing-field medium, they had exactly the same access as any high-and-mighty journalist. The latter, accustomed to being little tin-pot dictators and censoring any opinions they didn’t like in their media, were quickly put on the defensive.
And this developed into a sort of dependency: the scribes desperately wanted respect from the Twitterati! Not surprisingly, Twitterati have utter contempt for the journos, and said so in no uncertain terms. The Twitterati — some influential commentators include @atanudey, @barbarindian, @sandeepweb, @swathipradeep2 —clearly did not buy the same old anodyne Kool-Aid that was being dished out.
And then the western media picked up what bloggers and Twitterati were saying. This hit the uppity journos where it hurt the most. They fulfilled their greatest ambition — getting their coveted fifteen minutes of fame in the New York Times or Washington Post; but, alas, it was via a commentary on their (lack of) journalistic ethics and on the harsh judgment of the Internet readers.
As a result, Vir Sanghvi, for all practical purposes, fell on his sword, shutting down his impugned column. Barkha Dutt tried the opposite tack: brazening it out and proclaiming innocence. This did not work; NDTV’s credibility is damaged and her ratings have plummeted (according to TAM data for December). An attempt at self-defense on TV boomeranged: she appeared shifty and guilty as charged, Nixon-like.
Furthermore, the IBN network, also viewed with derision as #IBNlies, was caught by @preeti86, ham-handedly fabricating fake tweets (messages) from non-existent identities in an effort to inflate support for its positions.
Pathetically, the scribes and their sock-puppets (planted supporters) are attempting to paint themselves as victims of a conspiracy among Twitterati. But this is not selling. One of the sock-puppets, some minor Bollywood type screeching #stopabuseontwitter, showed himself to be a hypocrite by making crude sexual suggestions to a woman online, and then running for cover when someone brought up IPC 509.
Fed-up Internet mavens have long complained that the media in India is corrupt, sold out (#paidmedia and #dalalmedia are popular terms) and anti-national. It appears that the Twitterati have finally created an alternative, uncensored, independent channel for news and commentary which is as subversive as the samizdat underground press in the erstwhile Soviet Union was. Even more ominously for the powerful, there is the example of OhmyNews in Korea. This paper, initially a one-man effort, became so popular that eventually it was instrumental in toppling an elected regime in 2002.
Will the emergent people’s media in India play a similar role? That would be poetic justice — he who corrupts the media falls to its new, web-enabled incarnation. The establishment, naturally, will fight this: a new push to monitor Internet usage may lead to a great firewall of India, stifling the new medium.
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