Friday, March 25, 2011

How does the News in the Future Look Like?

WILL IT be psychologically customised and reflective of your changing intellec­tual moods as in a fifth generation Star Trek adventure, or will it deliv­er everything through SMS on a touch sensitive display? If the sig­nals from CNN, BBC and other media in the West are a pointer, the assumptions are wrong, it would be more narrative and synonymous with 'history'. And from now on, the species of historians will face an imminent threat of peril. This is what most of the world reports of these international media, and now their Indian clones foretell. History has always been a textbook for us; never had we read history for other than academic adventures. It had often disguised the truth, and told more untruths but its discourse had prevented it from being interpreted as blatant lies or propaganda Thus, there is an element of reliability and authenticity, we generally attribute to history, which has often become its character. This situation has become similar for everyday news in the information age or in other words news has replaced history not only by function but also by its con­structs. Today nothing differentiates a historian from a modern day jour­nalist for both of them share the same scientific temper and method­ology of approach. The give and take has produced a more dangerous cloned organism; news with all the traits of history or news which gives us a feel of reading history, with all its borrowed attributes of authentic­ity, chronology, reliability, inquiry and interpretation. The recent reports of CNN, BBC and Time magazine on the Palestinian siege, Afghan war and the Kashmir crisis explains the new phenomenon.
Time's Asia' edition on the Internet has two special pages cover­ing the recent happenings in Afghanistan, and India. The special page-'Afghanistan Today,' is a photo adventure while ‘Back on the Brink' gives a series of Time reports on the crisis over Kashmir. Readers would baffle at the wealth of information, supplemented with numerous graph­ics, photographs, videos, interactive images and even military maps and would be forced to accept their ver­sion of 'history.' The BBC's special page 'Kashmir Flashpoint' has out­smarted Time magazine. It has a 'Forum' in which correspondents will answer your questions - what else you need for eyewitness account; and also another link 'Conflict Queries' where the BBC answers your 'doubts' about the conflict. It also has a special page which 'coaches' the reader on the history of Indo-Pak conflict. CNN's exclusive 'Borders of Unrest' is yet another account that portrays India as an 'aggressive' player in the region' with tensions on borders with all its neighbors. Its special page on 'Kashmir, has an interactive multimedia on the South Asia power play and both nations strike powers. The CNN’s special page on the

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