I am in total agreement with that observation on all media. I rarely see television and my main exposure to media is the newspapers.
A news item shared on WhatsApp by a fellow 6 on 1 Friday blogger Padmum, gave me the idea for this week’s topic.
This story as it comes during the time when our state government has banned distribution of printed news papers by hand during the lockdown in our city, almost made me cry. I am addicted to a dose of five newspapers and the seven crossword puzzles that they contain every day for my forenoon occupation and only I know how I have been managing without them since the lockdown. And, in all fairness my despair is more for the loss of the crossword puzzles than the news in those papers.
Unlike the West, where the print media is losing ground to Television and internet, in India, it is flourishing or should I say was flourishing thanks to a very news hungry populace deeply involved in our politics and sports. Unfortunately however, while the headlines may contain the news, most content is opinion and the op-ed pages just reflect the philosophy of the news paper, and for the English press in India, it is left wing and anti just about everything.
One therefore tries to see what the foreign press has to say and sadly, they are no better. Here is a classic example of what a leading news paper from the land of two of my fellow bloggers here reports and why we are not particularly enamoured with them either.
The Militant Monk shown in the clip is Yogi Adityanath, the democratically elected Chief Minister of our largest state with a population ~25 million. He is an ascetic forced into politics thanks to years of misrule in his state of residence and very highly thought of by his constituency. Contrast that with Baghdadi about whom I hardly need to explain.
The Washington Post is hardly alone and if I start to list the other news papers, my readers will get bored and leave the rest of the post unread. I am sure that they know exactly what I mean.
This is my take on this week’s Friday 6 On 1 blog post topic. The other five bloggers who write on the same topic every Friday are Sanjana, Padmum, Raju, Shackman and Conrad. This week’s topic was suggested by Padmum. Please do go over to their respective blogs to see what they have to say on the topic. Thank you.