Media is the plural of medium. Medium could mean many things: a middle state; an intermediary, an intervening substance, as air or a fluid, through which a force acts or an effect is produced, the element that is the natural habitat of an organism and surrounding environment. Media include many types – communication media such as print media, broadcast media, computer media, advertising media, digital media, electronic media, news media, mass media, social media and many others. As a listener, viewer, or reader, I am dissatisfied with their present state. That is the nature of media. As a communication engineer, I know that a medium is needed for communication. It distorts, amplifies, attenuates, and corrupts with noise, the signal carrying information. So I am neither surprised with the bad quality nor the continuous deterioration of the media. The objective of Telecom Engineering is to enable receivers to estimate and extract the signal from lots of noise. Even as a student, a wise one eventually knows how to learn truth from many imperfect teachers. It needs effort to decipher the truth.
So let us restrict our attention to news media – print, broadcast, radio, TV, internet, even social media such as the Facebook and mostly gossip media such as the telephone, particularly mobile, particularly when talk is cheap. I am not an expert in media studies but let us understand it together as naïve observers. In good old AIR days our radio was very good, in fact outstanding; it positively contributed to Telugu culture from Madras, Vijayawada and later Hyderabad stations. DD was a deviation. We got TV after Pakistan. Why? Rulers with dictatorial tendencies wanted it, to thrust their faces and voices on people. In India, it was in Indira Gandhi’s time. The person-to-person communication medium telephone was neglected, being dismissed as a luxury or business aid. It needed a relatively innocent and well-meaning leader like Rajiv Gandhi to bring telephone and computer, enabling the people.
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