must draw inspiration and take cue on the important role of the media as a sentinel for the people, as a force keeping the three estates, i.e. the executive, legislature and judiciary on tenterhooks every time they fail to come up to the expectations of the people or have failed in their service to the people, the ultimate sovereign.
Journalism is not just about “bad news being great headlines”. True that murders, accidents, fraud, kidnappings, riots, etc. form part of news and help sales of a newspaper. The challenge for the media is to carry such stories not for the sake of their newsworthiness, but within an overall theme of questioning the agencies responsible, be it the family value education that has become weak, or the religious leadership that has lost its grip on making the world peaceable and the people loving and caring, or the administration which has failed to ensure equitable, if not equal, distribution of resources resulting in situations of conflict, or the lackluster law keeping mechanisms that failed to contain outbreaks of violence in society. The greater challenge though is in identifying issues that do not make “hot” news in the general understanding of the term. It is easy to be subsumed in the so called “hot” news to improve circulation and revenues and never question the lapses that engender such news in the first place.
The failure of the education department for instance can be at the root of majority of the problems in the state. Under implementation of school projects resulting in pitiable infrastructure, corruption in recruitment and posting of teachers resulting in non-functional educational set-up, leading to low levels of access to quality education, which leads to a mass of uneducated youth, low levels of education leading to low levels of awareness to keep the representatives in check and also leading to high levels unemployment, resulting in general discontent, serving as a catalyst to the militancy by way of easy recruits, so on and so forth. It is the role of the media to educate the masses of these linkages of failures in one sphere to problems in other spheres and to keep the government at constant check to fulfill its responsibilities under the social contract, where the people give the representatives the authority and responsibility to look after their welfare.
It is one thing to show pictures of bad roads in front pages and another to go into the reasons for the deplorable conditions of public roads. The media should dig up whether it is the corruption in the contracting system or the weak revenue collection by the government that deprive the people of good roads. It is high time for the media fraternity in the state to make serious individual as well as joint efforts to lift the levels of journalism from that of an occupation to that of service to society. It is high time that media houses steer away from being communal organs blowing parochial tunes to ones uniting the people in their vigilance to keep the organs of the state and the functionaries there in on high alert and prevent them taking the people, their masters, for a ride.
