India should fear its own media |
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", said Franklin D Roosevelt.
The year was 1933, and the pivotal wartime president delivered his first inaugural address during one of the darkest periods in the history of the United States of America, when the great power was muddled in the Great Depression, facing a total collapse of its economic and psychological systems.
The point to take inspiration from the famous quote is to draw a parallel between two distinct yet similarly disruptive eras, the fear of fake news and misinformed media in the present-day world, India in particular.
While Roosevelt originally targeted fear as an unreasoning, internal barrier to economic recovery, today's digital age has replaced that internal sensation with an external, information-driven challenge: infodemic.
The Godi media, a term coined and popularised by veteran Indian journalist Ravish Kumar to describe biased Indian print and TV news media, is now recognised as the foundational architect of modern information disorder being spread by Narendra Modi's........