Media and democracy

In my book The Great Indian Dream, I hadu00a0 stated that democracy in a capitalist economy tends to become an illusion since one of the biggest forces of a democracy is the media; and in a capitalist world, the media is mostly owned by private profiteers who promote news that will increase their profits, or those of its key stakeholders.

Add to this the fact that governments themselves are non-democratic when it comes to protecting the image they want to propagate ufffd like in the Julian Assange case ufffd and resolve to extremes like murder and all kinds of illegal arrests to stop the media from functioning freely. The communities which have been at the receiving end, are the investigative journalists and whistle blowers, who have perpetually struggled to bring facts to the forefront!u00a0

For example, American journalist Daniel Pearl had uncovered secrets about the involvement of Pakistan's ISI with Islamic extremists and the next news of him people got was his video, getting beheaded in Pakistan, being circulated on internet.

Musa Khankhel, reporter for The News International and GEO TV, who was kidnapped and later found dead, was reportedly working on a series of public events addressed by senior cleric Maulana Sufi Mohammad in Pakistan. In 2004, Paul Klebnikov, working for Forbes, was attacked and shot in Moscow. Even the Forbes' Russian edition acknowledged that the murder was "definitely linked to his professional activity". According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 70 media persons had been killed while covering the Iraq war between 2003 and 2005.

In this world of media, which is either being controlled tightly by governments even in democratic countries or being influenced by lobbyists ufffd to me, the best way to have an unbiased media is the one which is run by multiple journalist cooperatives, with the State even funding them partially.

But since that's in an ideal situation and less likely to happen soon, the Internet has come as a boon for such people (especially investigative journalists). Because when media caters to the profiteers, the true
not-for-profit journalists make a huge impact on the net; and they must be protected ufffd of course, the laws should be stringent enough so that impostors cannot pass off their crap as journalism on the net. For only when the media is unbiased and honest does a true democracy have a real chance to prosper.