Impact, the marketing journal from the exchange4media group, has conducted a five-city poll on the mood of the nation after the Niira Radia tapes stung Barkha Dutt, Vir Sanghvi, Prabhu Chawla and eight other media stars. And the results are revealing.
# 86% of respondents feel let down by the thought of journalists as “fixers”. That feeling is palpably higher in Madras (95%) and Calcutta (92%) but Bangalore (73%) seems to be the most pragmatic of the five cities.
# 66% say media is protecting its own, although 43% think so in Madras, where the 2G scam is headquartered more or less (A. Raja, Kanimozhi, Dayanidhi Maran, M. Karunanidhi) and where the only coverage in The Hindu has been by way of comment.
The poll has been conducted by Synovate, but the sample size or the dates of the poll is not known.
Anurag Batra, the chairman and editor-in-chief of exchange4media, clearly has an opinion different from the 86% per cent. Batra who recently called this “the golden era of Indian media”—despite paid news, private treaties, medianet, etc—writes in his latest column:
“What disturbs me of late is the way different media have taken on each other, trying to reduce journalism into a sham and journalists into a caricature! My sense and submission is that some vested interests are trying to paint journalists and journalism as negative and tainted and I believe these vested interests are being fulfilled even if unknowingly by the media itself! Raising questions basis this episode on other senior journalists is like a self goal for the whole media community. It’s sad to see that when the whole nation should be questioning the government about squandering of so much money belonging to the tax payer, we have forgotten all that and focusing on what few people from media did.”
Read the full survey: What does the nation think?
Also read: If you trust polls, trust in media dips
