Managed to see a “Face the People” on Indian bloggers. Barkha did us version of the false empathy-Indian Oprah act. The rest of the programme was on expected lines:
Lots of talk about people blogging about sex. (Gasp!): I guess the people at NDTV have not read Mastram. Or are people just out of girls convent schools and have not seen the latest item number in Hindi films. But I guess it gets the ratings up so that “Dr Roy” can shore up his dwindling net worth and compete against the richer TV/Network/Whatever 18 guys. So pretty much in order. And anyway I don’t see what’s wrong in writing about sex anyway. I mean Lolita is about sex, and it is the one of the greatest works of fiction …
Blogs are scurrilous /rumor spreading: True. But there are a lot of bloggers doing some path breaking work in the last year. The Khairlanji massacre was first broken by a blog (atrocitynews.wordpress.com) before the TOI (surprisingly) picked it up. NDTV did its bleeding heart act much later. And Indiatogether and Shivam Vij have consistently done some great work about stuff which the Mainstream Media chooses to ignore.
In my view most of the mainstream media still follows the old information economics model where a bunch of self appointment wise mean , like the aforementioned Dr Roy tell us what is good for us. The truth is that TV news channels are in the entertainment business, not the news business. The channels which have realized this like India TV are doing great guns. While Dr Roy at NDTV is just doing financial engineering to ready himself for a sellout to an international broadcasting company.
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