New Delhi, 13 April 2014: Here to speak on the topic of “Role of media in the current times,” senior journalist and Chairman of the Media Studies Group, Anil Chamadia, spoke at the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind headquarters on Sunday. His talk focused on how the media is capable of manipulating the minds of its viewers and the major role it plays in shaping the thinking of the public.

Mr. Chamadia started off by defining what mainstream media is and how the only a few large media houses control it. According to him, the mainstream media was in the hands of a few media houses such as Times Group, Hindustan Times Ltd., India Today Group, and Zee Media Group.

“Out of the 80,000 registered newspapers and periodicals, and 400 registered news-channels, only 8 to 10 make up the mainstream media,” he said.

Criticizing the media, he went on to say that their behavior towards the poor was terrible as it did not focus on their problems. And at times, the media was also found to be very communal as well. But he went on to say that this behavior is the same as it was before.

Mr. Chamadia went on to tell the audience how the media can create misinformation within the public by slightly contorting the news. In his example, this practice had been going on long before the current state of the media.

Further on, quoting a study conducted by the P. C. Mahalanobis Committee, Mr. Chamadia established how even the few large media houses, which comprise of the mainstream media, was controlled by the a few wealthy industrialists within the country.

According to the study, 11% of the National Income went into the hands of 1% of the population. Chamadia suggested that this income, in turn, is being used to fund the media by this small portion of wealthy and powerful people for pushing their own agenda. For example, the Jain families and Birla owned most of the major newspaper publications in the country.

He regretted the insurgence of advertising in the media saying that advertisers had started to dictate what the media should or should not cover. Since the media was already dictating to the public what they should or shouldn’t like, advertisers had become ever more involved in developing the tastes of the public.

Another showing of the extent to how much stake and control the corporate had in the media industry, newspersons that earlier did not make much money, were suddenly getting high-paying salaries. This was only due to the funding of the media houses by these large corporations.

In conclusion, Mr. Chamadia insisted that there is more research to be done about the media to understand how it works. It is necessary to understand what the media is to be able to solve the problems that come along with it.