Pratap Bhanu Mehta president of the Delhi-based thinktank, Centre for Policy Research (CPR), in an interview with Karan Thapar for CNN-IBN:
Karan Thapar: How do you view the Indian media? Do you share justice Markandey Katju‘s concern, that by and large it is obsessive, it is narrow-minded, it focuses on middle class – urban concerns, ignoring the real problems that affect India such as poverty, such as joblessness.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: My concern is not so much the issues it covers. It is that whatever it does, with a few exceptions, it is not bringing sufficient rigour and it is not performing frankly the function of being an honest broker in very, very important debates. The media is failing Indian democracy, I would agree with justice Katju to that extent.
Thapar: I know you are not a participant on television debates but do you watch them or do you find them off putting or irritating?
Mehta: You watch them in the way you would watch an entertainment show. In fact my own sense is that I think people are very wisely making the distinction that news is entertainment. It is not news.
Thapar: But of course it should not be entertainment at all.
Mehta: But of course it should not be. It’s exactly that confusion of roles that is crippling us.
Thapar: So TV debates may be entertaining but in terms of informing, educating, illuminating, they fail.
Mehta: Actually they are quite dangerous because they present a false construction of what public opinion is.
Read the full interview: Pratap Bhanu Mehta
IJR 