Freedom : How the media handles its responsibility?

I am confused, please help me understand. A conservative newspaper like TOI has the headline “60 and Getting Sexier”. The news channels falling all over the place in an attempt to grab eyeballs, trying to outdo each other while making us believe that India is the next super-power. In the gloss and hyperbole, nobody had the time to do a reality check. In this din and this devious marketing campaign what got totally looked over was farmer suicides, naxalites, separatists in north-east, the protests of Singur, political agendas, vote bank politics being masqueraded as affirmative action and so many more. The media was happy projecting how well India has done and the reference was Pakistan. That country which political analysts say is on the brink of becoming a failed state. I wonder when will come the day when the reference point is South Korea, a country exactly one year younger to us.

And since the focus was Pakistan, how could Kashmir not have been the focal point. It was interesting to see how the Indian media has been cleverly promoting the separatist cause in the name of “objective” and “secular” reporting. The fourth pillar of democracy is eating into the roots of the country. This is the pillar that was expected by the founders of the nation to be the voice of sanity but unfortunately in a clever play of statistics it is creating a world of make believe. The way figures were being manipulated and sexed up makes me wonder who was at work –Journalists or Marketers.

Neither Mr. Rajdeep Sardesai nor Ms Barkha Datt and by implication Mr. Prannoy Roy (that doyen of free media who gave us The World This Week) pointed out these essential facts when they gave India the statistics that 87% Kashmiris want independence or held a Indo-Pak debate where pro-India voices where ruthlessly muzzled. The expression on Major Gen Roy Chaudhary by the end of the program said it all. And here let me quote Mr. Kshemendra Kaul views on this article[a smart ploy to save myself research effort, I guess that should make me eligible for a job in the Indian Media houses ;-) ]...

"Yogendra Yadav and Sanjay Kumar are also woefully unaware of the regions they are commenting upon. The Poll has confined itself to Srinagar and yet the duo call the results as those from the "Valley". They obviously have no idea that Srinagar is only a small part of the "Valley".

Using the 2005 Electoral Rolls as a guideline, Srinagar voters account for 0.67mil (22%) out of 3.11mil in all of Kashmir "Valley". So any Poll results out of Srinagar can by no stretch of imagination be called as being representative of the "Valley".

Interestingly Srinagar voters are only 11% of the total eligible voters in all of Indian controlled J&K

In Jammu 255 people were polled and in Srinagar the number was 226, a ratio of 1:1.13. However, there are 1,058,540 voters in Jammu and 673,648 in Srinagar, a ratio of 1:1.57. The sample sizes chosen from Jammu and Srinagar have some inexplicable and certainly not credible rationale.

Similarly, with India's population five times larger than that of Pakistan, the respective sample sizes of 2030 and 1010 are askew and make little sense. "

To compare how statistics can be weilded to show what one wants to show, check the following link. This link is to the reporting of the same survey in Dawn, a leading Pakistani newspaper. The contrast in nature of reporting is drastic.

http://www.dawn.com/2007/08/14/top1.htm