Jahangir's World Times First Comprehensive Magazine for students/teachers of competitive exams and general readers as well.
The importance of media as institutional pillars of society and State is unmatched by any other pillar. Consequently, the independence of media needs to be made so secure and authentic that independent media became as sustainable as an independent judiciary.
After World War-II, the levels of economic development and institutional stability divided nations and states into the First World, e.g. the USA and Canada into the Second World, e.g. major communist and socialist states and the Third World, e.g. Kenya, Pakistan, Bolivia. Media have rendered roles in the development of nations that can be placed in the following modes:
- As articulators of national identity, promoting campaigns for independence from colonialism or, where nations were already free, as reinforcers of recognised national identities.
- As representatives of majorities, and of minorities within nations.
- As motivators for national cohesion and unity, and doing so not necessarily only when owned by the state or controlled by governments but as expressions of their own beliefs and policies.
- As sources for valuable information about development, as in providing guidance and advice to farmers via radio and TV on the use of seeds and fertilizers in support of agricultural extension workers, who first helped promote the concept of development communication.
- As advocates of the free market and of consumerism, disseminating volumes of advertising content, serving as extensions for the marketing of goods and services.
- As means of expression for the marginalised, the dispossessed, the persecuted.
- As the public’s own, de facto, ombudsmen regarding people’s complaints and grievances.
- As independent, first-hand reporters on the actual situation in zones of war and violence.
- As popularisers of the arts, literature, music and creative cultural work.
- As mirrors of reality in respect of the basic functions of media, i.e. for information, education and entertainment.
Media have an intrinsic bias for urban centres. Most media practitioners live and operate from them. Advertising, the life-blood of commercial media, also originates from the cities because all the decisions regarding placement of advertising in media are taken there.
Seen in conjunction with the already abundant presence of media, such political and economic change will create entire areas of globalism that will be placed within the framework of singular nationalisms. News media will be expected to function as ‘early warning’ sentinels that alert citizens at large and the leadership of civil and political society to the critical trends already emerging within nations as also likely to develop in the future. Whether news media can fulfil such expectation depends on the innovations and versatility they develop in their professional capacity. They will need to add new capabilities that go far beyond event-centred reportage and stenographic reporting to creative and conceptual levels untrapped in the conventional mindset of daily journalism.
Perhaps this century will also witness reconciliation between a basic contradiction that prevails between States, societies and media. This is with regard to the curious anomaly to be found whereby there is virtually no sharing of media content on a daily basis between the civil societies of States which, on the official level, enjoy historical and contemporary relationships of deep friendship. For instance, the media of China, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia have no inter-action on a popular level with the people of Pakistan. There are various reasons for this anomaly such as linguistic differences. But the anomaly becomes an amusing paradox when it is noted that, in contrast to this lack of day-to-day contact between the people and media of countries with which Pakistan has excellent relations, the media of India have an extensive and intrusive presence in every Pakistani town and city, and in many villages as well. The irony is made the more stark by the hostility and outright conflict which have marked Pakistan-India relations for almost six decades. Here too there are explanatory reasons. But the contrast between one set of States, societies, and media, and the contrast with the Pakistan-India equation, remains an area worth venturing into for the purposes of rationalisation and reconciliation in the decades ahead.
Several highly combustive conditions are likely to characterise the 21st century. With world population set to increase from about 6.2 billion to about 9.2 billion by the middle of the 21st century, certain countries, and their cities in particular, are going to become giant concentrations of humanity living in conditions of congestion, pollution, competition for scarce resources and space for assertion of respective identities which can only but lead to life lived as if on a razor’s edge.
Terrorism thrives on news media’s addiction to the sensational and the destructive. Terrorism damages nations and State structures by fomenting insecurity and uncertainty.
Terrorism thrives on news media’s addiction to the sensational and the destructive. Terrorism damages nations and State structures by fomenting insecurity and uncertainty, by undermining the ability and credibility of State institutions to effectively protect the lives and property of citizens. Some media seem to revel in repeatedly showing the terrible outcome of violence. This gives to the work of terrorists just the very exposure they cherish ‘but such coverage also drives people and nations into gloom and despair. Do media in the 21st century need to review the instant, high-pitched sustained coverage given to brutalities and to terrorism committed by States and by non-State actors, without reducing the scale of the tragedies, and without diverting attention from the implications of such acts?
The 21st century will be as much an era of building State structures and systems as it will be a period of building and boosting nations to their optional potential.
To conclude: media in the 21st century will have a full and daunting agenda. How to facilitate the building of better systems of democratic governance in rural and urban areas. How to help make nations cohesive and how to make states more respectful of individual citizens and of human beings even as media and their audiences move onwards into uncharted times of fascinating complexity.
The importance of media as institutional pillars of society and State is unmatched by any other pillar. Consequently, the independence of media needs to be made so secure and authentic that independent media became as sustainable as an independent judiciary.
