Is it really news????

News in India today is undergoing a dramatic change, for good or worse! The good old days of seeing some meaningful & quality news on the national network or at least from production houses like NDTV and Aaj Tak are gone. News in India is heading in the direction of the news in the west, giving importance to hype and so called 'celebrity' news rather than to the real news.

It's really sad to see the standards of the content in the news bulletins falling to new low levels each day.One can safely say that this degradation of standards ,in news, in India began with the advent of too many private 24-Hour news channels at once. In order to grab the viewership ratings , to increase their Ad revenues , news channels are competing with each other to give importance to "hype" rather than quality of the content in the news.

I mean just think about this once.... when a news channel carries the wedding of a celebrity or an awards function or a fashion show as its leading headline of its bulletins rather than an issue that really matters.....u know that the standards are not the same as they used to be.Even most of the so called infotainment websites in India like indiatimes, rediff, sify etc. are really reaching new lows to grab attention of the public, putting senseless news items as their front page stories.

For example, look at this headline that appeared a couple of months ago on indiatimes.com... I swear this is true....

" Are girls more promiscuous than guys?"

come on.......for god's sake is it really "news" ??? I mean I don't have an issue with the topic, hell that is what the freedom of speech/expression is all about....but isn't that kinda needs to be discussed in other sections. Aren't there more important issues like corruption,poverty, high HIV rates.... that need to be addressed and dealt with?

what's the solution then? How to change this situation?

To be frank, one can't totally blame the cable news media for this pathetic mess...after all they are doing this to stay in business in a very competitive market. Then who's going to deal with this situation?

Well the responsibility of this lies with the people of the country itself. The public passively accepted this at the first place and they only could change it now. It is only up to the people who watch and read such news to change the way news is going to be presented in the future.They have to really herald in the change so that news remains news. Objective news networks like BBC or Public networks like PBS are required in todays world, not some nonsense cable news channels that really harm the society without anyone noticing or realizing it.