NEW DELHI: As an invisible, potentially fatal Covid-19 forces both life and business to intertwine into an indiscriminate mix, public access to credible information becomes a yardstick of our readiness to combat this invisible enemy both as a community and a resilient economy.
Indias new #WantMyPaper campaign is a testimony to the authenticity and credibility of print journalism, and a clarion call by people to battle misinformation.
Since time immemorial, the newspapers have been the peoples ombudsman – asking difficult questions, demanding answers, and bringing public attention to pertinent discussions. In a way, newspapers somewhat mirrored our familiar public spheres in a sense, with the added layers of accountability and expertise.
With time and technology, however, unregulated public spheres gradually rode the wind of digital changes and have manifested themselves into a democratic social media ecosystem. While this is a great way to open the mic for progressive discourses, it has also spelt a massive influx of misinformation. The biggest challenge with digital media is also its greatest asset – pervasiveness and lower barricades to access.
Despite multiple online fact-checkers and digital guidelines, most of digital media screening is primarily dependent on audience feedback. Digital content, therefore, does not enjoy the same degree of verification at the production point and waits until someone from the audience points out the flaws to rectify itself.
Newspapers, on the other hand, have an active network of legitimate sources, expert reporters and authoritative editors who look at every piece of news before it goes out and impacts the audience. While this does not guarantee 100% efficiency, it does minimize the risk of large-scale misinformation by bringing in accountability.
Again, contrary to the prerequisite of immediacy for digital news, print journalism is a lot more incisive, in-depth and time-consuming. By the same virtue, it also has to its disposal a lot of time to check the information written in the pre-printing stages and can afford to provide more perspectives and context by going beyond the 5Ws and 1H of journalism to explain the impact of the news on the readers everyday lives.
Especially now, with peRead More – Source
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