Media should avoid playing God, says expert

The watchword today is the 'exclusive story'.

A television channel, to get more advertising, seeks to get stories that other channels do not have and in their obsessive drive often misses out on a full, comprehensive coverage of the news, Bhaskar Ghosh, head of the Parliament channel, said here.

Ghosh was speaking at the department of journalism and mass communication of Visva-Bharati University, which recently organised its first-ever 2-day national seminar on the media.

Ghosh said the selling of exclusive stories simply represented the predominance of news marketing over news coverage.

Channels gave viewers exclusive, and therefore more saleable stories, stories that gather more advertising revenue than others.

Ghosh said that news, the best news, means a strict adherence to the truth.

Today, several media units professed it, but through their very emphatic and obvious biases and priorities try to make it conform to what they want the news to be.

The greatest danger here was to resist the temptation to play God as it was becoming almost irresistible.

Newsmen make the terrible mistake of assuming they had some kind of luminous insight merely because they had a media unit, be it a newspaper or a television channel they controlled.

Ghosh restricted his speech to television channels.

Ghosh spoke about the major transition that took place in reporting when the news bulletin started coming into India from foreign satellites.

The appetite for 'real' news bulletins sharpened and there was an increase in demand for on-the-spot reports, for television journalists taking viewers to personalities and events, interviewing people and commenting on developments to stories.

It was a matter of time before the wave of news bulletins led to dedicated news channels like Star News and Zee News, and Doordarshan became just another channel carrying news bulletins.

Other speakers included media professionals like Avijit Dasgupta, Snehashis Sur and Amit Chakraborty.

Biplob Loha Choudhury, convener at the seminar, speaking on 'Media Reporting: The Reality Show And Its Future', pointed out that the first shift in reporting took place between two World Wars as radio compelled newspapers to go for straight lead reports.

It affected changes in perception of sourcing, writing and editing of reports.

It required in-house training and was therefore accompanied by the birth of the first journalism school in the world "" Columbia School of Journalism in USA.

Choudhury said it appeared media's dominant mood today was entertainment and even news, the essential component, was produced just to be glanced at, surfed through and switched off.

Amit Chakraborty, director of the two Bengali channels under the Tara banner, spoke on ways that enabled individuals to become a prolific journalist.

Chakraborty said that a reporter should always try to find the right person to tell the story.

That target was to be asked the right questions and the viewpoint should be presented in a way that enabled the viewer to comprehend the news or development through images.

It was imperative that a journalist did not mould a story to fit some pre-conceived idea or structure and avoided any bias.