PEJORATIVE MEDIA IN NEPAL

By Nav Raj Pokharel
Media in Nepal are pejorative. Every media, despite its distinct unplanned, callow and biased contents, claim that they are professionals. Traditional tenets are major factors that impede their pace towards modernization.

The hackneyed trend is, however, found worldwide and particularly in the third word countries.The third world experiences problems in each and every sector, in its economic, political, and social structures. Traits of the problem are distinct in every aspect of general life, as a predilection force in almost every individual in media houses and media contents.

The persons who join media as journalists are rarely independent. Most of the time, they are prone in taking sides. The journalists with a distinct mission or cultivated inclined propensity toward a side are evidently partial in media contents they prepare. Manipulated piece of information studded meticulously with prominent news and views feature, finally, ruins the purity of the both:independence and professionalism. And, the self-esteemed professionals are contented with their media skill that unwittingly makes the contents pejorative.

Until a journalist can renounce likes and dislikes toward ideologies and isms, ours and theirs, and favoritism and nepotism, skilled and stoical the journalist may be in hiding thier pain or pleasure on the final copy, the undertaking is distinctly evident to the eyes of the astute audience and the reader.

The word 'amoral' means neither moral nor immoral. It is not being the both. It is not being to any side. It is the plane where journalists have to attend to become 'the journalist' in true sense. Few dyed-in-the-wool journalists only can attain this glorious height. Once they reach to the height, whatever assignments they undertake, it becomes professional piece of writing.Because the piece of information does not reflect sides, but reality.

If you watch the trend of Nepali media, you will find them favoring the one, or the other in different phases of political cycle. They change sides immediately based on the direction the wind starts blowing. Democracy, non-democracy, people, government are but scapegoats for them to take sides. Right and wrong does not seem to exist in their style book.

Respecting their self-explanatory reasons, why and why not something is good or bad, I differ on terming themselves as professionals every time I see them manipulating the information based on their comforts.

The way they extol or reproach the issue distinctly leaves a footprint of their artificial endeavor, which does not articulate anything substantial. As a result, it fails to inoculate media effect in the mind of people. Everything they manufacture becomes tantamount and ephemeral. A labor lost.

There are more than half a dozen television stations, and broadsheet media and still more FM stations in Kathmandu alone. They could be running the media better as prospering enterprises in terms of financial standing; however, none of them is able to show the real picture of Nepal and Nepali,yet.

It is because they are pejorative while selecting, researching, and gathering, gate keeping the information, and presenting them. Until they learn how to be disinterested with the issues, and the sides, and to select, research, gather and present the information, media in Nepal are unable to show the real image of the country and its people.


Nepal Horizons
Posted on: 2008-06-02