By Nav Raj Pokharel
Media upheld as the fourth estate have eroded its intrinsic essence more and more due to the dependency and easily available sources splashed in the magic engine called internet.
Media that can influence millions of mind, educate innumerable readers and viewers, and give platform to numerous people for their voices, can become a magic instrument in the hand of unprejudiced intellectual professionals. But, more often it is seen and felt as a marionette in the hands of some powerful and media tycoons, all over the world.
The media when it want monetary return for its service, it becomes an enterprise. When it behaves as a commercial enterprise, its single tacit objective becomes earning profit. When monetary profit and loss in media is prominent, all the essence the media has or it should have, vanishes in thin air. Once the real essence is lost, power of media is also lost fro good. Unfortunately, so has become the case to the media particularly in the third world countries.
Reason behind deteriorating situation of media is two folded. One is Bias and another is Challenge of Survival. Between the top two, bias is more prominent as it permeates influence on the media managers and the media entrepreneurs though evanescent for their trade and career, but of course, deleterious to the society.
Bias means prejudiced or distortion of result. It refers to partiality, preference, unfairness, predisposition, preconception, favoritism that no media want to be tagged with. Media managers can assimilate bias in media content in volition, with intention. If not, the bias, just like an infinitesimal virus, contracts the media; If not quarantined properly before it assimilates in media contents as fittingly as media elements.
A strong, well-developed, well-trained, and well experience nose is indispensable to have the bias smelled; requires skills to have it separated from the media contents. It needs assiduous efforts to stop the bias sipping in information when a journalist prepares visual board in television or first copy in print.
Bias springs up from the core of intellection. Ninety-five percent of chance is that people observe and understand something with their predilection, and further understand and interpret them accordingly. They honestly espouse what they think is right but being unaware that they are the unwitting accomplice of media crime.
Bias comfortably coexists with intelligence, as message with medium. Message and medium is not the same thing. It is very difficult to distinguish message and medium to a callow journalist. Journalists and media managers will feel it reasonable, valuable, and relevant for their media, if the issue, agenda, and event are acceptable to them. If not, they will reject it. In both cases, key player governing their jurisdiction is not them but their bias, when observed meticulously. It is very difficult to dissect bias from intelligence. That is why, perhaps, the word “bias” also refers to spirit and soul.
A media manager, for an instance, bears the responsibility of identifying issues for media content, getting them gathered as news or views, process them in suitable style, form, and presents them as properly as possible. The practice is similar in every nook and corner of the world. But, sovereignty of choice and skill to interpret and transform the issue in different angles is contingent to his proclivity. And, right there it gives the bias a fecund ground to germinate and grow, and in crucial time grow wild.
Noted and well-off media houses and some News Agencies are taking advantage of this seemingly subtle ploy and have been feeding archetype news, views, and pictures to their subscribers across the continents.
Subscriber media seem contented to have the events and world issues covered with the purchased media contents, unaware of the amount of “biasness” unconsciously infiltrated in the media contents. Shall not the media be deleterious if failed to detach the bias?
Another prominent aspect is the challenges of survival. Information is looked for, investigated, identified, gathered, processed, value-added and sold in the market, just as the consumer items and services of daily needs. When media has to work like an enterprise and compete in the market tantamount to the necessary commodities; sensitizing a piece of information and other media ploys are employed in their presentation to popularize the channel and the media to survive the cutthroat competition. In this case, higher chances are there for the media to become deleterious and inoculate the biased media effect in the mind of the million.
Since we know that bias is inherent propensity of human being, it can never be sloughed off, minimizing it with great endeavor is , however, not practical always in creative work on everyday basis. Some experienced educators advise to practice indifference to attain balance in news. To exercise indifference in creative works like journalism is not empirical at all. When the journalist practices indifference, he forgoes curiosity. Journalists without curious heart are gauche and insipid.
Therefore, the best way could be to develop a culture, a tendency, a predilection, a dire need to peer the other side of the story so that even if a journalist does not prefer to bring forth the other point of view of the story, he will find it unavoidable nitty-gritty elements in his story. It is a curiosity to look at the issue and agenda from others standpoint, and not the journalist’s, as always. Once a journalist learns and brings it into practice, creating balance in the story becomes easy and unobjectionable to anyone, making him/her a professional one and the media a credible, and media effect constructive, meaningful.
Content of bias, just like the toxic smoke, would dissipate in the air soon after the windows of the room are opened.
2008-08-19 14:47:46
(REleased in telegraphnepal.com on Aug 192008)
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Comments (1)
I have been reading your opinions for quite some time now. Your write ups are verbose and your ideas are often lost in your love for words. But, lately, your ideas have been showing up eventhough verbosity remains. May be, it's so because the accuracy of the use of words is increasing. You have come a long way, Navaraj. Keep it up.
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