Media and Pontification
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: May 27 2015 -
The “everyday construction” of the image of Manipur by both the mainstream as well as the local media has been linked to how the two conceptualize the State and its associated phenomena.
While the Indian Nation-State’s obsession with its agenda of territorial “frontiers” and “sovereignty” is all too palpable, the ways, the local media portray temporal and spatial realities have been subjected to limited perspective on the same.
While there are too many glaring examples to cite, the point one needs to note here is the fact that the local media had been following a pattern that creates distance between realities and desired realities, consequently producing and reproducing inaccuracies, hyperbolic and one-sided stories through the acts of sidelining complexities rooted to multiple contradictions.
When one takes a cursory look at the “gaps and silences” as a result of peculiar and limited understanding of the core, it is not surprising to discover how even the peripheries are even pushed further to the marked borderlines.
This basically means that Imphal centric media’s obsession with the localized core has been more or less replicating the mainstream media’s system of content generation.
This is why there is a constant need to seek a review of the dominant ideology of the local ruling elites so that the distance between the localized core and the peripheries are narrowed down.
Proposing an agenda through the media should ideally be based on certain universally acceptable rules and ethics that guide the generation of content.
If adequate care is not taken, the media’s endeavour to inform and give the whole picture without bias would end in moral pontification over what constitutes news rather than act as the watchdog of democracy.
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