Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air. - Henry Anatole Grunwald
I came across this quote and it set me thinking as to how relevant the quote is. “Signs of horror” set me into thinking about the emerging trend in journalism-campaign journalism or citizen journalism. Campaign journalism hopes to make press more relevant to people as citizens. In the age of social networking and the emergence of technologies connecting to any person in any part of the world is much easier. There is Facebook, twitter –nouns which have now turned into verbs. We have mails, group chat, video chat so on and so forth which make it so much smoother to connect to people.
And hence, as a result, campaigning is the new trend. Be it against an issue-like the campaign organised by Kiran Bedi “India against corruption” or be it for certain individuals like in the case of arushi talwar or Jessica lal case.
The only point to be noted or the only question to be asked is whether a particular campaign is after all campaigning for the right issue. The justice for arushi campaign had a major flaw, hemraj who was found dead along with arushi, had no human rights activists fighting justice for him. And the judgment was already made by the public, so said the media. That arushi’s parents were the ones to be blamed. And the reaction by udhav sharma cannot be termed as right always.
Campaigns have risen in number now, majorly because of the technology. And also because of that movie like “no one killed Jessica”, RDB are made.
India shining, teach india campaign are some of the campaigns that have found popularity. Not to mention jago grahak jago, a programme for consumer awareness which earlier wasn’t present.
N. Ram, the editor of The Hindu, was reported as “stressing the need for the media to play an important “agenda-building role” to stamp out social evils such as child labour, Mr. Ram said he was pained at the present trend in the media, more pronouncedly in the electronic media, of “propaganda and campaign journalism” where a reporter was required to give “snap judgments” on all kinds of issues without knowing anything about the subject and the anchor person asking all sorts of questions. Such careless treatment of important issues by the media which was expected to shape the opinion of the masses could not be taken lightly"
it is very crucial for a campaign to be for a right cause. but then again, right and wrong is a relative term.