By IANS
New Delhi : Terming free press as a “basic necessity” for democracy, Vice-President Mohammed Hamid Ansari Wednesday expressed concern over the growing commercialisation of media.
Ansari was speaking on the occasion of the presentation of International Press Institute (IPI), India Award for Excellence in Journalism – 2007, to the Outlook magazine.
The award was conferred on the weekly “for its investigative journalism and its pursuit of the truth”. Ansari gave the award to Outlook Editor-in-Chief Vinod Mehta, who pledged on the occasion that he and his team of journalists would continue to strive for “excellence in investigative journalism”.
“Today’s media organizations are large business entities with thousands of employees and huge financial and other assets,” said Ansari, while referring to “a new set of media stakeholders, namely the shareholders of the companies”.
“These developments have brought into play a new set of considerations that guide the professional decisions of the press. The days of the great editors who had a decisive say in newspaper policy on public issues are a matter of the past,” Ansari lamented.
“Today we have a basket of considerations in which the demands of professional journalism are balanced with the interests of owners and stakeholders of media companies and their cross media interests,” said the vice-president.
“The interplay of these conflicting demands is evident and a subject of public debate,” said Ansari and quoted an “eminent” journalist saying “even editors who support the liberalization of the Indian economy have become increasingly concerned over the growing control that advertisers wield over news content”.
The vice-president apprehended that media’s “growing distance from its historic role as the provider of public information threatens to transform communities of citizens into islands of consumers”.
“Today one hears about newspapers where the news pages are outnumbered by advertisement content, where the distinction between editorials and ‘advertorials’ is very thin, where the pressures for accelerated reporting overtake the need for accurate reporting and where there appears to be a congruence of sting journalism, reality shows and propaganda,” said Ansari.
“There are complaints of erosion of news values and of a focus on personalities rather than issues and processes.”