The media landscape has undergone an exponential transformation in the last two decades, said Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari on the occasion of National Press Day on Saturday.
Addressing a distiguished gathering that included Vice President Hamid Ansari, Press Council of India Chairman Justice (retired) Markandey Katju an Information and Broadcasting Secretary Bimal Julka, Tewari congratulated the media fraternity and said National Press Day "always provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the state and role of the media in the current milieu".
Referring specifically to the exponential transformation in the media landscape, Tewri said: "This epochal change has been facilitated by the emergence of the World Wide Web. Starting life in the Defense Advanced Projects Laboratory of the Pentagon it has truly revolutionized the way we live and conduct our interactions."
Listing six significant factors that facilitated this change, the minister said they were:
a) The internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history-and it has succeeded.
b) It represents the largest ungoverned space on planet earth.
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c) Never before in history have so many people from so many places had so much power on their finger tips.
d) Every two days more digital content is created than from the dawn of civilization until 2003.
e) What is evolving is a tale of two civilizations; one physical that has evolved over the millennia and one virtual that is still very much in formation.
f) New Media rides on the back of this World Wide Web.
He, however, said that what is yet to be analyzed in depth and detail is how this democratization of news creation, aggregation and dissemination a bottoms up process - sans editorialization is impacting both print and broadcasting newsrooms in addition to transforming the contours of the media space.
He said that there are some other pertinent questions that the first generation of the digital age should address with some measure of dispatch to ensure that the process of defining agreed global rules of engagement commences in right earnest in the virtual civilization.
On media and public interest, Tewari said public interest has myriad subjective connotations.
"It can and may mean various things to various people, but what public interest certainly cannot mean is the promotion, propagation and proclamation of private Interest in any area of human endeavor," he said.
He recalled the words of former Rajya Sabha R.K. Mishra in 1974: "Now, where is the freedom of the Press? What do we have? In India we have the freedom of the newspaper owner; In India we have the freedom of the newspaper proprietor and in some cases the delegated freedom which is enjoyed by the newspaper managers ......and the working journalists will continue to be paid employees doing whatever the newspaper proprietor wants him to do."
Tewari described these words as "pungent but profound words that have proven to be almost prophetic in their import."
He said that on the occasion of the National Press Day, "we must rededicate ourselves to the cause of empowering the working journalist as well as creating the necessary wherewithal that supports truly independent media initiatives.