![]() ![]() The gatekeeping concept, despite its usefulness and its potential for dealing with many different situations, has a built-in limitation in its implication that news arrives in ready-made and unproblematic event-story form at the ‘gates’ of the media, where it is either admitted or excluded. This is also related to the fact that ever since the emergence of 24-hour broadcast news services and even more so since the advent of online news the reporting speed required of news services has also increased steadily, which has made gatekeepers even more likely to rely on prepared material from this ‘fifth estate’ rather than spending time and money on their own, independent research. 2000: 29, following Franklin) and undermining the reliability of the gatekeeping process itself. The “fourth estate” is in danger of being overwhelmed by the “fifth estate”, the growing number of “PR merchants and spin doctors” influencing the news agenda’ (Turner et al. Lately, however, the effectiveness of gatekeeping has been questioned from a number of perspectives: on the one hand, increasingly ‘the practice of journalism is being contaminated from outside. Following Lewin and White, McQuail defines gatekeeping as ‘the process by which selections are made in media work, especially decisions whether or not to admit a particular news story to pass through the “gates” of a news medium into the news channels’ (1994: 213). In media such as print, radio, and TV, with their inherent strictures of available column space, air time, or transmission frequencies, it is necessary to have established mechanisms which police these gates and select events to be reported according to specific criteria of newsworthiness, such as Galtung & Ruge’s news values (1965). It seems that the future that the above quote is talking about is NOW.įor a long time, gatekeeping has provided a dominant paradigm for journalistic news gathering and news publishing in the mass media, both for journalists’ own conceptualisation of their work and for academic studies of this mediation process. – Scott Adams, The Dilbert Future (1998: 202) Otherwise it’s the same old Rana in The Times’ New Delhi Bureau contributed to this report.In the future, everyone will be a news reporter. I need to see charge sheets, prosecutions, someone still in jail two years from now. “The usual thing is to set up a commission made up of recycled bureaucrats,” he said. Raghunandan, who has seen scandals come and go, said he can predict the future of the latest one. It also includes comments from those who successfully resisted. Senior leaders set the tone for lower officials all the way down the ranks, he said.įour months ago, Raghunandan helped start a website called IPaidABribe.Com that invites citizens to share their stories about paying bribes for everything from driver’s licenses and passports to traffic violations and land registration. Raghunandan, a retired senior government official of 26 years. The scandals are fed in part by a structural problem, said T. They follow alleged malfeasance in the lead-up to October’s Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, which saw a newly built pedestrian bridge collapse and the final budget come in at 30 times original projections. The scandals have raised questions and much hand-wringing among newspaper columnists about the cost of corruption for a nation trying to attain superpower status. Dutt and Sanghvi have denied any conflict of interest and said they were never asked to lobby for the then-telecom minister. Raja has told reporters he was only following recommendations under the 1999 telecom law. Sanghvi has “taken a break” from writing his column. The former telecom minister, since dubbed “spectrum Raja” by the news media, was forced to resign last month. ![]() In effect, “the country becomes no more than a banana republic.” “The real danger, as the Radia tapes show, is that the country is completely in the grips of a few large corporations using fixers to manage everything, including government ministers, parliamentary discussions, the media,” Bhushan said. Radia is also heard pressuring two prominent journalists - Dutt and Hindustan Times columnist Vir Sanghvi - to serve her clients’ purported interests. The tapes hint at influence peddling among Raja, Radia’s corporate heavyweight clients Reliance and Tata, and politicians in the ruling coalition. Shocking to many here was just how much lobbying, which is officially illegal in India, has become a fact of life. ![]()
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