Are we too balanced?

I have been spending too much time glued to the IDIOT Box of late. As I scour through the countless "NEWS" channels it just struck me that how being selective and partial can be passed off as unbiased, honest journalism. There are two arrant realities of our 'teledemocracy' that have acquired epidemic proportions. One, NEWS channels are in the business of 'selling' news so they only show what their target audience & advertisers 'want' to see. And second, 'Sensationalism' sells across all 'markets' & each of them is trying to upstage their competition using rather inventive no holds barred techniques.

While Times NOW doesn't bother airing 98%(just a conjecture,but Times may have actually researched a figure) of the news as it offends the sensibilites of its SEC-A market, Star News features the Saas Bahu cast & crew even more prominently than any national or international event. NDTV works, walks, talks, thinks and attempts a world view of everything from a rather posh penthouse may be somewhere in GK but you can not miss the 'phir bhi dil hai hindustani' suggestion. The rest of them compete on speed, sting and ofcourse smut. While there is as always a sliver lining in the clouds but survival for such channels is increasingly becoming difficult.

However even this blatant commercialisation has had a positive impact on free availability of information (as well as opinion). But the shameless effrontery with which they posit convenient myths as impartial opinion is appalling. Their arguement of not taking sides is facetious because by not taking sides you are siding with the indifferent. In a nation with an overwhelmingly insensitive state machinery and an oppressive judicial system such "indifference & impartiality" should best be left to the state alone.As humans with aspirations of living in a civil society we should be willing to take the risk of empathy and constructive action wherever its due. It doesn't have to be one of us (excuse the cliche) on the altar for our conscience to be stirred. Lets not allow our right to 'news' be bigger than someone's right to life and livelihood. Maybe its good business to confine even activist journalism to the fashionable and take sides with the popular...