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For many people the world over, reading the newspaper is a ritual that signifies that the day has started. Over the years, the look and feel of the newspaper has changed and with the advent of TV news channels, the newspaper industry has been chastised by various sections of the readership saying that the breathless nature of TV reporting has crept into the print media in the form of sensational news and what is now increasingly becoming a fixation to the point of obsession with the rich and the famous. On another tangent, the inroads made by the ‘news on the go’ section of the media today in the form of online news outlets is leading to a situation where some newspapers have simply shut shop while internet sites have crept in their place. While the traditional followers of the media may well frown upon online portals taking their place under the category called ‘media’, the truth is that even social networking sites are now contributing to media output. This comes with its own share of issues in terms of veracity and other journalistic ethics but the truth is that more and more, the nature of reader interest is changing globally. There is an increasing interest on what celebrities of every hue are doing. At one point, called the celebrity watchers journalists who covered the rich and the famous were given a tag called the ‘papparazzi’ while newspapers had a page that devoted itself to the going ons of celebrities: the Page 3 people. The demand for more on the Page three people has in a sense, also contributed to tabloid news that sells itself on ‘exclusives’ which would be nothing about any growing issues about the world and the society that one lives in but filled with the latest designs about clothes, shoes, homes, cars and gadgets. The fixation of celebrity watching as a global phenomenon is best seen in the amount of media imprints on the latest birth of the Royal Family of Britain. Print and TV media and online media had only the ‘latest’ updates on the birth of the child to a point of near hysteria. In India too, celebrity watching in the national media is picking up with more and more attention on what actors and then cricketers are up to in their lives both personally as well as professionally.
The smaller media is spared the celebrity phenomenon thankfully mainly because smaller media are based in small towns where celebrity-hood is not granted easily. But having said that, the local media here has its own blinders when it comes to news. Over and above media being caught in between the devil and deep sea crisis, given the nature of the push and pull between various state armed forces on one side and non state armed forces on the other, there is the endless array of civil society groups and students groups who will all decide what is news and not. If celebrity watching is the popular favourite the world over for media followers, in Manipur it is mostly a tendency to keep a watch for blood and gore. There has been no in depth study of the nature of media readership in the state so far but suffice to say that the one main news that almost all sections of people want to know about for varying degrees is on whether there is going to be bandh or roadblock or both somewhere in the offing. Another important focal point that readers want to know is when the LPG gas cylinders can be filled in and where. Everything else is secondary. The news on bandhs are indicators for where one can venture out while updates on blockades can trigger off panic buying for essential items but mainly, to stock up petrol, either for use or for selling at inflated prices. Apart from news on bandhs and blockades and keeping tabs on gas stocks, what occupies the mind of people and become the subject of intense discussions and debates is the nature of social crimes in the state, which is where one needs to look at whether the media is failing the public in terms of what it is handing to them as news or whether the level of readership and the media consumption is falling down in terms of interest, credibility and acceptance.
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