Media Fodder

The "SUN" is coming to India! The dreaded tabloid, from Rupert Murdoch's stable, known for its invasive and often inaccurate reporting which will cater to our tendency to relish other peoples' difficulties and personal problems will make its debut in Tamil Nadu, to be precise!

Henceforth we can expect that whatever little that remains in the form of semblance of ethical reporting in our media will be consigned permanently to oblivion.

Anyone raising as much as an eyebrow against how those who might wish to use downs in the lives of unfortunate men and women like say a Gitanjali Nagpal, a Uma Khurana, a Princess Diana, or even the hapless family of a kidnapped teenager which finds its plans to rope in the police to secure their son's release and trap his captors are splashed on TV channels as a consequent of which the captors kill their son in desperation, will be so overwhelmed by more and more of similar reporting that one will have to resign to fate and be content with protecting his or her private turf from sniffing and poking reporter sleuths.

In short, everybody, whether Good, Bad or Ugly can become Media Fodder.

That the arrival of the SUN on our soil will happen just when there is a reawakening of public opinion in places like the UK against unbridled snooping into personal matters cannot go unnoticed. In countries which we might regard as havens of free speech and commerce, art and criticism, there is a rethinking on the horizon about how much freedom the media should really have when it comes to reporting on other people's pure personal matters.

'Life After Scandal' is a play that is running full house in the UK these days. It portrays infamous celebrities whose pitiable lives are taken advantage of by a media without scruples.

In this play, whose genre is termed Verbatim Theatre, there is no interaction between actors but they are in direct talk with the audience. Noted celebrities whose lives have become hell after scandals relive their pain which has been made all the more unbearable by the media which wants to make millions off their scandal-scarred lives. Lord Edward Montagu talks about life after a homosexual scandal. There is Edwina Currie who had an affair with former British PM John Major, and there is Conservative Jonathan Aitken who was jailed for bribery, all talking about how the media has been using their plight to make its millions.

There are those who might argue that knowledge about consequences of an undisciplined life will deter youngsters from emulating celebrities or stars, many of whom often end up as recluses and drug addicts. But the same opinionators will not speak out against the media for glorifying these very lives prior to scandals which makes one think the media makes a fast buck either way, both from one's ups and from one's downs. In more ways than few, celebrities who become used to the media's constant glare during their heydays dread the day when that glare might disappear as they begin to fade out and when that fading out is accentuated by a scandal their agonizing lives become a permanent milking cow to the media.

All said and done, the media is there to dish out what we want, therefore what we want is what it is all about. If we want that the media does not make money out of people's miseries and calamities then we the public should be prepared to shun the juice which we seem to relish from others' personal disgraces.

Khwaja massoud