Why not black journalists in India?

There is not a single news channel in India where black journalists work.

TV has been on an upward trend in India over the years. From the days of only Doordarshan, we are a country of more than 800 channels today. From two channels in 1991 (DD National and DD 2), India grew to 50 channels by 1996. This was around the time private channels emerged. In just five years, the number of channels had increased, reflecting the growing strength of the small screen. This growth was all round: news, regional, music, lifestyle, food, travel, science, wildlife, fashion, films and, of course, English entertainment channels. There has been no looking back since. Today, there are around 826 channels across various genres covering all regions of India.

But still, why is the media in India so negative when it comes to journalists?

Journalists are taught early in their careers that they must always be fair and objective and strive to get ‘both sides of the story’. Essentially, it means that they should not inject bias or their own ideological or other kinds of views when they report something. Besides, they must get a response to, let’s say, an allegation. This is called being balanced.

What problems are faced by black people who choose journalism as a profession?

If we talk about problems facing by today’s black people who chose journalism as their profession.

• Discrimination based on skin color, also known as colorism, or shadeism. is a form of prejudice and/or discrimination in which people who share similar ethnicity traits or perceived race are treated differently based on the social implications that come with the cultural meanings that are attached to skin color.

• Discrimination based on skin color is a type of racism.Discrimination based on skin color in criminal justice, business, the economy, housing, health care, media, and tones are seen.

• Lighter skin tones are seen as preferable on screen. They are facing other threats such as economic pressure, intimidation, job insecurity.

• Fair and objective: Fair anchors attract more audience, viewers to increase TRP of their show or channel.They show and manipulate news,with better TRP they get more advertisement and gain more money. So to gain more money they start compromising with news.No offence to any journalist who does his/her job with sincerity but even they know how the media works. It is the high superiors who want profit from the channel.

• Fish Market News: They don’t give news they just pick one scam or scandal or controversy and run a fish market on them.

• No wide coverage: Recently floods devastated Assam, but nobody covered it. Forget about the world, you will never know what’s happening in your country as a whole.

• Cluttered Screen:. The entire screen will be plastered with scrolling text No News Anchor only News Activists: Most of them can’t cover news of all types because they don’t have a bureau or correspondent scattered everywhere, so they become Activists like. “End VIP Culture” or “Say no to Corruption”. Better they join Arundhati Roy or Medha Patkar.

• Horrible English: Verbose English talking round and round without making any sense. In fact, it’s garbage English.

I believe India has the worst media channels. The fundamental principle of journalism is presenting unbiased facts without any judgements. They discriminate when it comes to giving jobs in their channel. Second, much information which they share doesn’t have any factual basis. For example, they showed that in 2000 rupee notes you will have nano chips and other fake features and it is done by their senior anchors. This isn’t news. This is straight on propaganda being shoved down the throats of 131 crore Indians.

We need a fresh generation of journalists.