Price of the salt

One side of the Nepali politics is that the ‘politics’ itself wishes to hide it for undiscovered reasons. This unknown side or the side that the politics wishes to conceal should be what the media should denude. If a media can’t do so or fails to uncover the other side of the truth, the media must close down for good as it loses its credibility and thus the desirability as well to stand in front of the society. For partially understandable reasons, it has been seen that a particular segment of the Nepali media at times prefers to neglect one particular event for it thinks either that the news of the said event did not carry much meaning to the society or is extraneous for the society and hence prefers to hush hush the matter. However, there is yet another set of media that digs the genuineness and presents it to the perusal of the society and the society later judges the matter and draws its own conclusions. Here too what has been perceived is that a news or for that matter an event brushed aside by one particular media for whatever reasons becomes for another set a super hit news item. In doing so, what has also been seen is that competing rival in the media for their own advantages or disadvantages take up the episode. So an eventuality assumes a different dimension when it is taken up or even neglected by the media barons.

The reason? Could be a bit of political theory. The one which neglects the issue could have done so for in its opinion the event in itself could be a minor one deserving no comments on that or it could also be a ploy of the media barons not to take up the issue that were some way or the other related to the political ideologies to which they themselves serve or were attached with. If it were so, then it is only but natural that the other competing rival grabs the opportunity and thus brings up the same and makes it a national issue. In doing so the media men involved in digging the truth appear guided by their own criteria that if they could expose the other equally competent rival would mean a political benefit to it.

Thus goes the process caring little about the ethics of the media that one presupposes that the men involved in this sector observe from tip to toe.

However, this appears absent in the existing scheme of Nepali media as it is being run today.

Whether it is politics, or a business, Nepali media appears to have been divided. This is so because we have a divided politics. This means that our loyalties too are divided obviously on political lines. This further means that we in the media must keep ourselves in the pockets of those whose "salt" we have been taking day in day out. It has rightly been said that one should never betray the man or person or even the country whose salt we take or swallow. The price of the salt must be paid and no wonder we are paying the price of the salt at a very nominal price. But is the price that we have been paying to those whose salt we are taking a nominal one? We consider that we are paying a very heavy price. Inside the country, if we are being paid to run our newspapers by political parties then we are doing a great injustice to the ethics of the media and in the process cheating the society willy-nilly. Shame on us.

And if we are testing the salt provided to us by alien forces and serving their political interests by even insulting our own mother and the motherland, what could be more shameful than this act? Should this mean that we could sell our mother if we are provided with tones of salt? Perhaps yes!

It is better to commit suicide than being seduced by those who have been extracting more from us for a pinch of salt. It is time that our national heroes, political leaders, the political parties and the men in the media to begin searching their own souls and find as to what extent we have been paying the price of the salt provided to us by inimical forces.

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