thevigil.in: public scrutiny of news media

By SHRUTI RAO

“Hindi news channels are the worst in the world.”

“Hindi news channels are like the a-hole of the media, dude”.

I’m sure you’ve heard mutations of these statements and if I were to switch on my Realistic, some of you might endorse the view too. At the television news channel boom in my teenage years, I heard channels like Aaj Tak welcomed like there was a new baby in town. Everyone shook their metaphorical hands and said their congratulations. India had 24X7 news. India gave birth to a young ‘un. And here we are in 2009, a few years later, where everything (at least around me and my social circle) seems to be running desperately in a downward spiral.

So what happened between then and now? Why have we,  the educated elite, forsaken the child we welcomed only years ago?

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By SHRUTI RAO

As an avid, and perhaps guilty reader of HT City and DT- there’s a trend I’ve noticed by the way of gradual percolation in the subconscious [ The guilt, mind you, comes from reading HT City and DT over the national news].

What I noticed at 14-15 in DT, has now blatantly appeared in HT City. Repeated articles. In the same paper. TOI used to run the same articles on the International page in the main paper as the one on it’s last page on DT. I wonder if that still happens now, since I hardly read the main paper anymore.

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