Modi at Madison and Journalism at lowest level

On September 28th 2014,  every Indian, back home and abroad, was waiting for the speech of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at prestigious Madison Square Garden, a highly prominent place of New York which witnessed many historical events. The event was even greater because head of each country in the world was present in New York for UN summit and no one among them received such a grand reception other than Indian PM. Not only Indian media even world media eyes was stuck on the event. They were capturing each movement of the Indian PM and Indian people. Everyone wanted to be a witness to that moment

The MSG was full packed, as per the reports it was more than twenty thousand, with the Indians who came from different parts of the US and US dignitaries who were invited for the event. Various programs were arranged to engage the gathered crowd inside and outside the MSG before the PM speech, the main event of the day. Big LCD’s were placed for the crowd who were not lucky to get the tickets.  PM Modi came and delivered the speech in his trademark style on which the crowd was gone crazy many times during the speech. The best part of the speech that he actually addressed the issues faced by the NRI community.

You all heard the speech, so I do not think that I need to repeat it here, if not please click here. The main agenda of writing this blog is the incident which was a black spot on the event. The black spot neither brought by the PM nor by the Indian crowd, it was actually brought from the media itself which was supposed to be present there only to cover the event.

A journalist(?), Rajdeep Sardesai, from a leading news channel Headlines Today first started asking questions, which was inappropriate according to the event, from the gathered crowd. That would be fine even if he only asked question but when he didn’t got the reply which he was expecting, taking a step forward, he started naming the crowd like low class, frenzy modi fans etc. He behaved like he was the only sensible, sober and intelligent person on the earth rest all gathered there were fool. And when people countered him he further stoop to the lowest level of the human nature and abused and physically assaulted people. Later on, his channel started showing the distorted clip to show him as a victim. But as everyone know the lie doesn’t have long life, another channel Zee News ran the complete footage of the incident to expose him. This was the great service did by the Zee News to the journalism by exposing the biased journalists.

Here, we see two faces of journalism one is completely biased and another which is showing the truth, but I am also not satisfied with the news piece ran by the Zee News because they also delivered it with adding some prejudice and judgement which was not appropriate.

The first and foremost requirement of delivering the news is that it should be without any conclusion, judgement or prejudice. The news should be present as the data and not the information. It is the viewer who should figure out the information out of that data. There is no judgement should be given in the news clip because it will affect the mind of viewer in taking right information out of the data. News readers should provide the data without any expression, emotion, prejudice and judgement.

Yes, I agree that the journalists are also a human who has their own views but when they personification as a journalist they should put their own views aside and only deliver the data to the viewer. The journalism is one of the pillar of the democracy and it is every journalist responsibility to  save it’s authenticity else the incident will repeat again with some other journalist at some other place.

“All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.”― Denis Diderot