Indian Opinion

Mukesh Devrari  Media is a practice. It deals with society. Like any other practice, it is also guided by certain ethics. But before dealing with media ethics one must answer 'what is ethics?' and 'what is media?'. Ethics is a form of inquiry concerned with the process of finding rational justification for our actions when the values that we hold come into conflict.  Media simply means all means of communication, which makes mass communication possible like radio, television, newspaper, internet etc. It is important to develop an understanding of ethics before dwelling into the concept of media ethics. The literal meaning of ethics is ‘to study what is morally right and what is wrong, the system of accepted beliefs, which control behaviour, especially such a system based on morals’. Ethics also mean the study of choices between good and evil, truth and falsehood, virtue and vice. The word 'ethics' is different from 'morals'. Morality means ‘st...

Mukesh Devrari  Negotiation and churning of ideas have become complex with the passage of time. Limitations in the generation of ideas can be one of the reasons for this development. More than that it is a cross-application of the same set logical analysis which makes everything difficult. Even dialectics has gone wayward. More than a collision of new ideas with the old one, it is becoming reverse. Old beliefs powered by new enthusiasm and sense of loss colliding with the new ones, perhaps also doing fairly well.   Bertrand Russell taught us that human beings must allow themselves to draw conclusions and inference based on facts. Human beings must not allow subjective notions, privileges and prior held ideas to colour the truth and justify their wrongs. It seems fairly a simple line. Reality is so complex that humans start from the very point of their practices. First humans act, then they look for the reason, not the other way round. Logic innately never leads huma...

Mukesh Devrari Mass Communication and political participation have meshed in each other to the extent that politics in modern mass society cannot exist without it. Mass Communication is used to ensure political participation which ensures the legitimacy of the ruling class. Every type of governing system needs to interact with people and the global community for a variety of reasons. It led to the growth of political communication as a practice and subject matter of study. Political Communication?  Political communication is a transmission of politically relevant information to the ruled by the rulers. It is a dynamic element of the political system and the processes of political socialization, political participation and political recruitment are dependent on it. Karl Deutsch in his book ‘The Nerves of Government’ says, “There are two ways to study political communication. One is to study it as a black and white affair, where means of mass communication exists...