Have you ever wondered what purpose a newspaper serves? So many things might come to your mind. But there is one which you have not seen before. Come and see it for yourself in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Here is a daily called ‘Sakshi’, which means 'witness' in English. In reality, it does not stand witness to anything but the ulterior motives of its promoter(s).
One might ask “what is wrong for a daily to be partisan? Which daily is not partisan?”. Yes. Media, all over the world, was never truly impartial. Almost every media house displays sympathy for either an ideology or a cause or a political party. But this one is not like anything else. Its sole purpose is malice. Its goal is not to build credibility for itself, but to destroy the credibility of all other dailies. Where else does a daily run a series of editorials on how bad the other dailies are? It has been largely successful in doing so. People of Andhra Pradesh do not trust any daily now; every daily is seen as equally bad.
Half of the news stories on this daily are not news at all, but its opinions and fabricated lies. It has mastered the art of presenting biased opinions as news. Whenever it has to report some good deed of its (political) opponents, the story begins with something like this, “At last, they do …”. To report a bad deed of them, the story begins with “As always, they do ..”. Do you notice the connotations implied by the phrases ( their equivalent phrases in Telugu) ‘as usual’, ‘as always’, ‘at last’ and ‘finally’? Whenever a story is attributed to ‘a politician who does not want to be named’ or is learnt ‘from our sources’, it is nothing but a lie.
The rot doesn’t just end with the quality of news, but it runs deeper. There is something more disturbing about the ways of this daily. It operates by the tried and tested principle of ‘divide and rule’. It tries to divide readers on the lines of political party, region, religion and the worst of all, caste. Everyday you can find indirect but very clear hints that drive home this very divide. Somebody does something because he/she belongs to a specific political party. Somebody criticizes them because they belong to a different caste. It wants to destroy the middle ground. In its view, every person belongs either to one extreme (a party or a caste) or the other extreme (another party or another caste), that nobody is neutral. And the result on the society is disastrous. A significant percentage of newspapers readers in Andhra Pradesh choose their daily based on their caste or religion or political affiliation; certainly not a good sign of things to come.
