Ours is an age of science and technology, based on precision and on scientific instruments.  The  first device to  strengthen our feeble  human  senses  in  our irrepressible striving to comprehend the  strange  and  elusive  universe  around us  was  the telescope. As Van Helden writes among the  scientific  instruments  which  have  played an important  role  in  the  growth  of  man's  knowledge of  the  world  around  him,  the telescope  occupies a position  of  historic  preeminence. When Galileo invented the (‘Galilean’) telescope, many people did not know but he also created the universe for us as we know it today. Many people may find it controversial but the fact remains that many path-breaking scientific discoveries with regard to the universe have been possible only with the help of this wonderful instrument. Just imagine how big the universe is in comparison to this small but wonderful instrument. All scientific paradigms these days hinge on the efficacy of this device. Thus, our whole universe reaches us via telescope – the telescopic universe.
Now if a single person may happen to own this device, don’t you think he also happens to own the universe? Don’t you think the same is the case with those cameras who hound on the world events for their eternal and disturbing hunger for the news? How many cameras video recorded the razing of the twin towers and from how many angles? The number becomes important or rather has been made to become important so as to gauge the ‘impact factors’ for the different world events including that of 9/11. Accordingly, larger the number of cameras, to make the news flash on the corporate-driven TV screens, larger the impact factors. And how many TV cameras were available to video record the plight of the eight thousand Talibans who surrendered before the northern alliance and US Special Forces on the guarantee that their lives would be spared during the Afghan war? How many reported the dreaded Containers in which they were transferred from one place to another with US soldiers hitting them with bullets to make holes for ventilation? With blood running from their holes, the Afghan roads consumed not only the Gulf petrol but also the afghan blood.
 Today’s media have become adept at what have come to be known as cherry pecking. Consider that virtually the entire British media ignored the deliberations of the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul from June 24-27. And continued to portray war criminals as world-straddling father figures, who could “solve” poverty in Africa and so become the beloved figureheads of a “great generation”.        
Print and electronic media these days do not only reflect realities but they have also indulged in, sometimes fortunately but in the majority of cases unfortunately, creating ‘realities’.
Television imagery is a site of struggle where the powers that be are often forced to compete and defend. As Gamson et al writes the lens through which we receive these images is not neutral but evinces the power and point of view of the political, {cultural} and economic elites who operate and focus it.
As used by Goffman (1974), the concept of frame becomes important here. A cultural level analysis tells us that our political world is framed, that reported events are pre-organized and do not come to us in raw form.
Baudrillard (1988) argues that dramatic changes in the technology of reproduction have led to the implosion of representation and reality. Increasingly, the former becomes dominant as "simulacra" are substituted for a reality that has no foundation in experience. Democracy Now, an independent news programme reports that in the year 2000, just six corporations dominated the U.S. media (and thereby the whole world).
With the concentration of this power in the few hands, the world has reached the brink of complete impasse. In one of her articles, the writer Arundhati Roy informs that Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, holds a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) which has recently bought 95% shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels in almost every regional language. So there is enough possibility now, with such a power under his thump that he will be in a commanding position to give twists and turns to the taste buds of the masses so as to grind his axe in the best possible way. And, interestingly, Arundhati Roy herself was commodified and was used as a bargaining chip by the same media for establishing the credentials of the Indian democracy in the world market of politics and democracy for World Bank loans etc. Thus, in today’s corporate media driven world, everything stands commodified, everything stands fabricated.

(Bilal Ahmad Ganai  is Research Scholar, Department of Political Science, Kashmir University. Feedback at bilalphilosophia@gmail.com)

Lastupdate on : Mon, 2 Apr 2012 21:30:00 Makkah time
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