Hamid Ansari inaugurates workshop on Parliament & Media - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

Vice President Hamid Ansari inaugurated a workshop on "Parliament and Media" here today. Delivering inaugural address, he said that today, the demands of professional journalists are carefully balanced with the interests of owners and stakeholders of media companies and their cross media interests. "The interplay of these conflicting demands is evident and subject of public debate. Eminent journalist P. Sainath has recently exposed the extensive malpractice of "paid news" and "coverage packages" that were deployed during recent elections in some states. He said thatt professional training of journalists can be imparted with greater ease and today's workshop is one such effort. "The difficult part is to resurrect the professional and ethical dimension of journalism. An initial step is to bring back the decisive role of the editor of a media organization and to dampen the interference of activist marketing departments in news content and coverage," he added. He said that the phenomenon of convergence between news media, entertainment and telecom has meant that the demarcation between professional journalistic output, public relations, advertising and entertainment is rapidly eroding. "Lack of a concerted effort to train media professionals at the same pace as the growth of media organizations has meant that quality has suffered and there is extensive competition for existing media professionals," he said "Media groups are trying to tide over the problem by instituting in-house media training institutes but the results so far have not been encouraging," he added. He further said that the explosive growth in the media sector has highlighted the fact that the Fourth Estate is the only one among the pillars of democracy that has an identifiable commercial and explicitly for-profit persona. "While the primary professional duty of media organizations is to their readership for keeping them informed and appraised with news, views and ideas, the commercial logic brings in a new set of stakeholders in the form of the shareholders of these companies," he added.