On the same note, there has never been a decent cocaine (or any drug story) story that has appeared in the media, simply because the people writing about the drug have no idea what it does (though, that said, there is no shortage of media-persons doing cocaine in this country - but those guys will never write). While the TV channels will run with hidden cameras to expose corruption, they shit bricks at sending a wired correspondent (with a hidden camera) for a drug run, because exposing corruption cannot get you in trouble (well legally it can, the bribe giver is also guilty under the IPC) but carrying drugs of any sort is punishable under a very totalitarian act. Yet, the sheer abundance of people in the media who think they know it all is amazing. Blah, blah, blah you hear them say in the editorials and the news, making issues out of non-issues but when something bad happens to them, they blow it up - I know I've done it.
And then when people sneer at me when they find out I'm a journalist, I'm not surprised. There are times when I might love the access to important people, the satisfaction of seeing your byline, but there are a lot of times when I wonder what the fuck am I doing here? And I've been thinking too much of that in the last two days, way too much. I don't know how I ended up as a journalist, but I've had my fun, and at times over the last two days I've just been down and out and want to get out.
Somehow, this Sunday's Dilbert kinda shows where we in the media have ended up.
10 comments:
Well, not really surprising since Google has become the be and end all of reporting these days.
Even here, I see bright eyed kids spouting gyaan on every bit of crap from impoverished kids under flyovers to everything else you can think of, while they know shitall about the things.
Information providing is not the media's scene anymore, it is over, we are here to slant it and present it to suit our case or our whatever is our axe to grind.
I am rubbing my hands with glee to see how these kids would feel some 8 months down the line, when the idealism would have evaporated.
The "what the fuck am I doing here?" question hit me a long time back and along came the answer too that the mainstream work does not hold any attraction for me. At the same time, the degree of flexibility that the industry gives you with your own weirdness is hard to find elsewhere. The result being that after being a trained journo, 5 years down the line in the career I've become a project manager. Weird, but you can't have everything in life, can you? But even this is not forever, ideally I'd want to set up my own shop of some form of media consulting and spew gyaan and make money out of it.
p.s: the dilbert strip has already started doing the rounds here, good one, thank ye!
Codey,
I was always cynical, its just that in Delhi I felt more concooned from everything, in this city on the other hand the disconnect is worse. I meet i-Bankers in the day who create money out of thin air *poof* and the money is there, and then you see the halat of the city. What happened on July 26th doesn't surprise me. And they want to make this 'Shanghai', someone has been on too much LSD. What bugs me is that every morning I read crap and more crap and then I watch crap on TV where people try to talk about the human condition. MTV Roadies is a better show than anything on the news channels. Whats the feedback to TVTN's new channel been?
Don't know much about the new channel, I hardly ever watch telly anymore for news, don't read it online even for that matter. The little bit i saw was looking very tacky.
Looks like blogger is under a comment spam attack, you might also want to turn anon commenting off in the settings.
Turned off anon commenting.
I've had spammers on my blog who've used ids as well (don't know how that happened). So I turned on word verification, but allowed anonymous comments (since not everyone has a blogger account). Wonder if that would help.
good idea.
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