Is the Press failing us?

The columnists of Times of India have an uncanny penchant for picking up topics which has very little or no journalistic value. All that these articles do is to flare the passion of religiousness in the minds of the dogmatic or take the so called middle class, pseudo secularists for a ride.

Few days back there was an article on TOI by Jug Suraiya based on an article,” Religious freedom experts put India on 'watch list'” published by Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Without going through the fact what the original article states, the article in TOI devoted half the space in lambasting the Hindu zealots and shading tears for the Muslim and Christian brethren.
It gravely stated that we as a nation (read Hindus) are becoming intolerant and are being incited at the flimsiest of reasons. It went on to detail the exploits of Hindu extremists (read BJP & Shiv Sena, RSS etc. with an emphasis on Narendra Modi) and the inconceivable pains undergone by the minorities (read Muslims), who already have the legacy of being oppressed for since independence. Then it went on to state about how a secular democratically elected government should tackle such issues and ended with a big moral question,” Are we playing in the hands of the zealots?”

Any reader of Hindu origin (please exclude the secularists – they form an alternate religion by themselves) who has gone through that article is bound to feel a bit restrained and embarrassed. After all it does not speak well about the oldest religion in the world, and which, if truth to be told is not a religion but a way of life.

The article was a clear subterfuge for bashing Narendra Modi, digging up the 2002 Gujarat riots. That is the sadistic pleasure the columnist derived and we helpless readers have to bear through his more than 200 words article. And sometimes we also tend to believe in these articles, the very reason why we subscribe to newspapers to get to know about the happenings of the world and to get expert viewpoint on current socio, economic and political affairs.
If we were to search and dig out information on our own it would be a difficult exercise and in that case newspapers will come to an early exit than predicted.

Pew Forum is a research foundation based in U.S.A (mostly supported by government and religious bodies of that country) and publishes research on a myriad of issues relating to the affect of religion on politics, law, world affairs and domestic policy.
The article on Pew forum was based on a rating given by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

Has anyone ever heard of such an organisation let alone paying heed to their ratings?
But if your main aim is to instigate or to take a sardonic view on someone you detest, you have to burn the midnight oil to find your source, however obscure it may be.

The link to the article is given, go through the same and find out how vulnerable we are in hands of such national newspapers. They twist facts, events and make us believe in things that have never happed and they do it without checks and balances.
From the day Thomas Carlyle coined the term “Fourth Estate” in 1841 to represent the press, we have had our firm belief in them.

But it seems what Oscar Wilde said few decades back holds good even today.

“In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.”

The original article in the Pew forum can be found here:
http://pewforum.org/news/display.php?NewsID=18553

Note: The Government of India has refused to grant visa to USCIRF for doing any study; much to the annoyance of Mr. Jug Suraiya (the fact he conveniently forgot to mention in his article)