Media Magazine

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Small is Dutiful

Last month’s column proposed an annual Journalism in Kerala report to monitor the health of the news media industry in the state. The quality and usefulness of such a report would depend most heavily on media researchers, who gather information and present the analysis. But research does not have to be undertaken always on a big scale, by professional researchers, or by spending lakhs of rupees. It can be useful to society even when conducted in a small way by non-researchers at low cost. The Nei...

Social Media as a Powerful New Communication Tool

Information is power, and communication is the art of transmitting information effectively for the empowerment of society. Media as a tool plays an important role in communication. The media in its current form has broadly evolved over three phases: traditional media, mainstream media of the 20th century, and the emerging social media of the 21st century. Traditional Media in India Traditional media was very popular at a time when there was no television, cinema, or printed newspa...

Socialisation and Transmission of Cultural Heritage (Major and Minor Functions of the Media - iii)

We are what we are because of the phenomenon of socialisation, which is social and psychological adaptation to society. Socialisation initiates a child into the accepted norms of society and makes it “human.” Society has a collective personality. As members of a society, we do not approve of certain behaviours. Our behavioural patterns are in conformity with norms established over a long period. When a child is born, it has a blank brain. It is the parents and elders that initiate the child in...

Sting Operations and the Ethics of Journalism

What is a sting operation? It is a part of what could be called “new age journalism,” with debatable ethical issues involved. It is more effective on television as a form of journalism, and in the print media it is generally referred to as an “expose.” In legal parlance, a sting operation is understood as a design concocted in collaboration with the editor, perhaps the publisher with vested interests, a journalist, and a videographer. The smartphone is now a viable alternativ...

Structural compulsions of crony journalism

Here is the situation on which we begin the ideas of structural compulsions of crony journalism. Here is a supreme Court judgement of enormous importance, which directly affects the future Indian journalists who come under the Journalist’s act, and how come the newspapers are so silent about it? This SC judgement upholds the Majithia Wage Board for journalists. Look at the extent censorship is exercised to the point there is no discussion when the SC says it is valid, and the complaints by the...

Summary of Recommendations on Issues Relating to Media Ownership

Defining Ownership and Control 1. The Authority recommends that the following definition of control should be adopted for all issues concerning media ownership discussed in this paper: An entity (E1) is said to ‘Control’ another entity (E2) and the business decisions thereby taken, if E1, directly or indirectly through associate companies, subsidiaries and/or relatives: (a) Owns at least twenty per cent of total share capital of E2. In case of indirect shareholding by E1 in E2, the ex...

The Hack

The journalistic education of Gabriel García Márquez In 1955, eight crew members of a Colombian naval destroyer in the Caribbean were swept overboard by a giant wave. Luis Alejandro Velasco, a sailor who spent ten days on a life raft without food or water, was the only survivor. The editor of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador assigned the story to a twenty-seven-year-old reporter who had been dabbling in fiction and had a reputation as a gifted feature writer: Gabriel Garc&i...

The Sage Handbook of Risk Communication & Youth and Media

The Sage Handbook of Risk Communication by Hyunyi Cho (Editor) Torsten Reimer (Editor) Katherine A. McComas (Editor) Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc; 1 edition (November 13, 2014) 376 pages Price: ` 11,777 In this comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of risk communication, the field’s leading experts summarize theory, current research, and practice in a range of disciplines and describe effective communication approaches for risk situations in diverse c...

The three processes of Communication

But intrapersonal communication precedes all other forms of communication as it is at the base of the human element in all models of communication. Messages are constructed by people --- persons and groups living in a given socioeconomic, political and cultural environment. They are conceived in the minds of those persons. And they are received by persons who too utilize their mental faculties in processing and absorbing the information contained in the messages. The mental faculties of ...

When a University Bored of Studies Sets the Standards

Last month, when this column turned the spotlight on the Kerala University’s Department of Communication and Journalism, I mentioned that academic freedom appears to have been abused there, as at other places in the state. Giving an example, I wrote about the assessment of scholarly output: “Rather than encourage the publication of scholarly articles in good, international, and national journals, the faculty have set the bar low with a questionable list of ‘Standard Journals in Communica...