| NEW
DELHI: Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal today said the General
Elections of 2004 and 2009 had proved that the common man had gained maturity
and was no longer swayed by what newspapers wrote. Speaking
at a seminar on lessons for the media from the recent elections, organized on
the 61st Birth anniversary of the late mediaperson Udayan Sharma, Sibal said all
the predictions of the media had been proved wrong both times. He
said the media should applaud this maturity of the common man and stop behaving
as if people would only be swayed by what was published in newspapers or shown
on television. Janata
Dal (United) leader Sharad Yadav said the divide between the mediaperson and the
politician should be bridged. He described the reports of politicians offering
‘package deals’ to mediapersons. Marxist
leader Sitaram Yechury said both media and political parties should seriously
assess why there was a divide in the way the media perceived politics.
Election Commissioner
S Y Quraishi said it was interesting that a single research organization had conducted
a pre-poll survey and given it to twenty channels and newspapers and yet each
of these reports were different from the other. He criticized the tendency of
the media – particularly the electronic media – to sensationalize everything
and referred to the controversy over Electronic Voting Machines.
Senior
mediaperson Kuldip Nayyar said journalism had become an industry and was no longer
a mission or a profession. Senior
journalist Pankaj Pachauri said the average Indian wanted to pay only Rs one or
two for a daily newspaper which cost the publisher around Rs 20, and just Rs 7
to Rs 10 per channel unlike the British who paid an annual licence fee of Rs 2000
for BBC. Therefore, the quality of news was unlikely to improve.
Several others
who spoke at the meet conducted by eminent mediaperson Rahul Dev Singh lamented
that marketing personnel of newspapers accompanied reporters in meetings with
politicians and that every newspaper appeared wedded to a political party and
not to democracy. | 
