Media

Pack Journalism / Journalism  

1. According to an essay in the Global Media Journal of Purdue University, Pack Journalism “is a phenomenon by which large groups of reporters from different media outlets collaborate to cover the same story. They cite or draw from the same sources, simultaneously, with the same purpose and employing the same methods. They move in a swarm where they observe carefully what the others are doing. Their main goal is to obtain comments from the important sources.


2. The term Pack Journalism was first coined by Timothy Crouse in his 1973 book “The Boys on the Bus,” on the media coverage of the U.S. presidential elections.


3. There are many reasons for Pack Journalism. The foremost is the desire of journalists to be on the right side of the argument and their dread of being unwittingly caught with the losing side. It is not that Pack Journalism is always without its advantages. The recent Justice Verma Committee’s excellent report on legal reforms for better laws for gender justice following the gruesome Delhi gang-rape and murder would not have been possible but for the power of Pack Journalism


4. Two important beats of modern journalism — politics and business — failed to even embark on a study to understand the diabolic convergence that was taking place in the name of cricket.


5. But a closer reading helps gauge the range of issues journalists are expected to cover, the width and the breadth of issues starting from the structure of sports management in India, the legality of betting, the overlapping, multiple conflict of interests, the extraordinary interplay between high capital, politics, popular appeal, and the level of opaque arrangement that prevails within the Indian business environment even in this era where state secrets are no longer secret, thanks to the efforts of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

Control on Advertisements 

• The fiercest battle the broadcasting industry is fighting today is against the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), whose decision last March to enforce a rule limiting advertisement time on television to 12 minutes-per-hour has news channels up in arms.