NEWS CHANNELS AS A BAD AGENT OF PUBLIC OPINION FORMATION
One of the most important and mandatory roles of news channels is to air important news. But, besides this mandatory function news channels of both TV and Social media have some more roles,viz,
1. Doing analysis of important news items.
2. Arranging debates on such items.
3.Incouraging public discourse by inviting distinguished personalities to air their views and opinions.
All these three functions of news channels when combined together convert news channels into a pressure group and also such function of the news channels make them engine for building public opinion. Although the reach of cable TV and dish TV and social media is limited but it is also in such a significant scale that most people of the society who play a vital role in the course of opinion formation have reach to such media. So news channels of all sorts in today's environment play a significant role in the process of formation of public opinion.
Now if we test Indian news channels , a few of many conclusions are the following-
1. News channels though are running 24×7 mostly repeat the same news all the day. Every news channel selects a few news of the day as per their own philosophical liking and political tendencies and air them all the day. Every news channel either neglects or does a little coverage of those news items which don't suit their ideologies.
2.News analysis in most of the cases are one sided and views and opinions of other side are largely ignored. Further the language and tone are toor much exciting.
3. Public debates in most cases are neither thought provoking nor sensible , rather they are mostly emotionally over charged which put off our senses of thinking and stimulate our passions and emotions. For this news channels select such topics which have immense potential for charging people with electrifying emotions.
4.No important thinker is usually invited to vent their opinions on the topics of national interests. This compels viewers to have been satisfied with limited philosophical understanding of the issues.
5.Choice of topics of debates and discussions are so that they seldom get connected with common man's life issues.
Selecting emotionally charged news items for relaying, selecting emotionally charged issues of debates, neglecting public philosophers and political thinkers , neglecting issues of common man's life, repeating the same item all over the day and in addition to such things airing fake news make the news channels a very bad agent of opinion building and in this way they do more harm than good. Alternative views are ignored and many a time are forced not to come to fore and this process contribute to making the country a land of ignorant population.