Media failure – Filling the void, Countering the lies.

Present status:

  • All pillars of democracy are corroded.
  • The Constitution is eroded.
  • We, The People of India remain.
  • The media is not portraying the truth to the people. 
  • What can be done to counter the media’s failure? 
  • How to carry the truth to the people?
  • Modi/ BJP government is turning into a fascist regime.
  • The opposition is threatened.
  • Congress party is wounded but still alive.
  • Why did it fail to expose Modi and the media?
  • Talking truth, following ethics, is more difficult while talking nonsense is very easy. 
  • Modi is bereft of answers; spreads loads of nonsense to conceal the truth; to confuse people with maneuvered and ‘Modi-fied’ media.
  • Even ‘liberal media’ is showing its limitations. It falls far short of revealing the factual position. So it falls on Congress to take up that responsibility, being the only effective opposition voice now.
  • Why does Congress fail to reach masses and communicate the true state of affairs?
  • Modi has unlimited failures; Congress has unlimited talents; It can easily expose the truth to the people but it still fails.
  • Obviously, it has structural and strategic inadequacies.
  • Congress should get back to its old values. It lost much of its touch with people. 
  • Problems within Congress are being carried over for decades. Its leaders at all levels, its wings, cadres as part of its structure are responsible. A reorientation and rejuvenation are needed.
  • Congressmen started looking upward for their future and greener pastures, their grand old party lost its foothold with masses. 
  • It lost its base, foundation, pillars, and along with their live ground-level communication and participants.
  • While structural weaknesses require repair and reinforcement immediately, it is also in dire need to remodel strategies of its communication and social media wings to meet the current needs.
  • This will be even easier as social media communication is popular and widely present amidst common people.

Social media communication – Some Inadequacies and difficulties:

  1. There is no coordination among handlers, leaders, cadres, and supporters. It is more of individual efforts without much focus or direction.
  2. Leaders/ cadres/ activists/ supporters are eager to build up followers but not so keen in following up and carrying forward the messages in social media. Many prefer to give likes. But spreading the right content is more needed.
  3. Repetition of contents by Echo chambers; Empty rhetoric, arguments, abuses, heroism, and absence of pointed questions, answers, discussions, analysis add to the problems.
  4. Viewing, selecting good content from stacks of garbage is difficult. They are lost in the process.
  5. Egos and complexes also play spoilsport. Pride, prejudices, and self-esteem create mental blocks that make discussion superficial; stops deeper analysis.
  6. Contents and responses have to be more focused to bring in clarity, awareness, and educate people about the truth behind issues. This does not happen and it helps BJP as it can survive only on lies and propaganda.
  7. Further, BJP has its own special ways to create garbage and confuse people. It has its own payment system, fake handles, and ‘mechanized vomiting’.
  8. Questioning or giving sermons to BJP about moralistic virtues, democratic values will not work. We can only wake up people who sleep not BJP who ‘fake it all’.

 

Some possibilities:

  1. Organized efforts, well-designed coordinated processes can be worked out and executed to overcome the inadequacies in the communication system to spread truth/ facts against lies. 
  2. INC needs to take the initiative. Others can also chip in.
  3. A Social media platform can be created to present all relevant content that is available in the media, filtering out clutter, garbage, hurtful content.
  4. They can sort and re-present under specific heads using different tag/s to facilitate focus on all right contents. 
  5. INC should further invite views, opinions, ideas, information through the media.  
  6. They should have additional quality controls to elevate the level of discussions and make them meaningful.
  7. The scope will widen as it evolves. The last word is ‘Any improvement will help’.
  8. In brief, it is a process of search, sort, select, serve on specific issues under one roof to enable incisive, analytical debates to differentiate right and wrong, pinning down lies, and bringing clarity and truth.
  9. Others can also adopt similar efforts in their own way.
  10. A structured approach by an organization backed by some manpower/  resources required, will yield a better result.
  11. It is all about channelizing, strategizing sources, resources encouraging realistic hopes, energizing actions, responses, and involvement.
  12. People crave for being heard. Why not listen and give them respect. Here the people include cadres, sympathizers, supporters, employed, unemployed, retired, experienced senior citizens willing to contribute their opinion, information, ideas if allowed.

Some benefits:

  1. People will have one main source to search for all the right content and onward transmission.
  2. It will be a focused effort with less wastage of energy while spreading it to all. Pointed questions may be raised and answers may be presented instead of most going unanswered.
  3. Healthy discussions will bring clarity to all including leaders. This will help to spread the message to the people.
  4. Shoot and scoot media will have to face uncomfortable, inescapable questions and answers in public platforms.
  5. Those who are choked by the paid-media and their masters will find a channel to communicate with people.
  6. Most of the media now, present one-sided views, thoughts, and hypotheses as opposite views are not allowed on equal footing. 
  7. Media has its limitations. It is not a discussion table with complete information or judicial scrutiny with all facts and evidence.
  8. There is no other scope to know the truth, sometimes even through the courts.
  9. A structured, truly open, truthful, regulated debate in social media platforms will help to place them before people’s court for their judgment.
  10. Truth invariably gets obfuscated, mutated due to post-truths and nonsense that is deliberately floated. Truth is clobbered and cluttered between uncouth lies and truisms that even learned find it difficult to piece together to recognize the truth.

Endnote:

Suggestions, ideas, information are building blocks for analysis, discussion, and evolution of solutions. The process never ends. It should always be open to attaining perfection. Even judgments are revised and reversed.

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