Rightly called the fourth estate, the Press is as indispensable as the three pillars of democracy: Executive, Legislature and Judiciary. The Press brings forth to the mass anything that is new and worth knowing about. I remember someone saying in one of the press conferences I attended, “The reason why we invite the media is that it forms an important part of the ecosystem we live in.” For instance, a product launch by a company is always followed by a press conference because post-launch, the company has two key functions: sales and publicity, with the former largely dependent on the latter. The three pillars of democracy and the Press therefore are interdependent entities that share the same habitat.
The Press is omnipresent. Don’t question why so but thank that it is so, because without it you wouldn’t have been reading this right now. Without the media, we would have all “survived” in our isolation. I can’t really say “lived”, because living implies something more than merely surviving. We humans by nature are curious beings wanting to know what’s happening on our other side. The media provides us the answer to this need to know. In fact, news, according to me, is giving our audience what they “need to know”. However, in today’s rat race for high NRS figures, TRPs and clicks, news is often being tampered, thereby giving the audience more “nice to know” stuff than what they “need to know”. To pick some random examples, the news about Shilpa Shetty winning the Big Brother is news that is nice to know. We don’t need to know that. We won’t die if we don’t know about it. But the news about hundred farmers committing suicide in a remote village of our country is news which we need to know. This is something that affects us as human beings and we ought to know about it.
The media has played a phenomenal role in many cases. Take for example its active role in the Jessica Lal murder case or the coverage of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. It might have been many accused of usurping the role of the judiciary in the Jessica Lal case, or criticized for telecasting shots that aided the terrorists during the Mumbai attacks, but what can’t be denied is that fact that in both the cases, the media has played a key role. Without the media, we wouldn’t have even known how, when and where the attacks took place.
The Press has its success stories etched in history, but it cannot afford to be complacent. As Henry Anatole Grunwald quotes, “Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.” Media plays a huge role in nation building and the traditional journalistic elements of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability are sacrosanct to the Fourth Estate.
