“Don’t respect your elders. Why should you, when all they do is fill your head with nonsense like casteism, communalism, superstitions and astrology. It is all humbug. I wish all of you have love marriages,” said Press Council of India chairman Markandey Katju, addressing students of the Department of Media Sciences at Anna University here on Monday. This was hardly the message the students expected to hear from PC chairman as he delivered the Anna Endowment Lecture, but Katju said he had his reasons for saying so.
Speaking on the idea of self-regulation in electronic media, he said that the businessmen behind media houses say that they give the people what they want. “By saying that, they are insulting the media. Will you go down to their intellectual level or uplift them and make them part of enlightened India? The third role of media apart from education and entertainment is to provide leadership to society in the realm of ideas, which it is not doing,” he said, adding that this was why society is still mired in backward thinking, and there was no progress. This was being passed on to the next generation.
Giving examples of how the media was failing miserably at self-regulation, Katju said in his usual blunt way, “If a doctor or lawyer does something wrong, there are provisions for them to be punished. Why not revoke the licences of the media houses which breach the law? No one can be unaccountable in a democracy. They are not above the law. And if self-regulation actually works, why do we have laws against theft, murder and rape? It is the same principle.”
He accused the media of diverting attention from real national economic issues like poverty, unemployment, education and health care, saying they were more interested in covering the lives of actors and garnering TRPs by showing “astrology, half-naked women and ghost stories.”
He also made no bones about the fact that he was against the arrest of Aseem Trivedi, a cartoonist who has been accused of sedition. “If you arrest a person who has not committed a crime, you are committing a crime. Both the bureaucrats who order ed the arrest and the policemen who carried out their orders should be arrested and tried,” the Press Council chairman said, adding that another similar case was the farmer in West Bengal who was held for asking CM Mamata Banerjee why her election-time promises remained unfulfilled.
Katju also called Aseem’s arrest a blatant misuse of state machinery. “In a democracy, cartoons are part of expressing ones opinions. Why must they have such an intolerant attitude?” he asked.
Ending his address with the age-old debate that Hindi be made compulsory, Katju said that he would advise people in Tamil Nadu to learn the language, but no one should force it on the State.
Comments
0 comment