Media and Corporate Sector

Media and Corporate Sector

By DR. Arvind Kumar

There exists a close nexus between media and the corporate sector in India and this nexus can be attributed to corporate fraternity because the mainstream media, both print and electronic, are owned by the private sector. The journalists working in privately-owned media are generally subject to pulls and pressures of their bosses which usually results in barricading of information into a corked bottle full of news. This also affords opportunities for some to become brokers and messengers of corporate and political scamsters. According to one opinion, there is nothing so surprising about it anyway. “It was all over there since the last many years, written on the smell of newsprint and on the walls of introspective memory, as transparent as stink, as smelly as a filthy quagmire, expressed and glorified in its own moral low ground, day after day, in word, image, sound, text, in convention and protocol, in rhetoric and clinical realism, in the banality and tyranny of mediocrity and success which has come to dominate contemporary journalism in India.”

Interestingly, many of the journalists have become tycoons, not journalists, anymore. And all of them seem tied up in knots with this or that corporate lobby of the neoliberal regime. It's a myopic club of the rich and powerful, market fundamentalists most of them, typically anti-poor, against enlightenment or social emancipation, bereft of values, and legitimise the quid pro quo of their personal and professional lives.