Budding Scribes Enlightened With Ethics

On Wednesday, November 16 2005, a seminar on 'Media Ethics : Fetters or Freedom' was organised jointly by the Mass Media Centre, Department of Information and Culture, and the Press Club, Kolkata, for the students of journalism and mass communication, on the occasion of National Press Day. The venue was the Press Club.

In his introductory address, Press Club Secretary, Anindya Sengupta emphasised on honesty and purpose of effort on the part of a budding journalist, to survive in the present competitive mass media scenario.

Prof. Amalendu Dey, talked from the historical perspective, which is academic as contrasted with the professional interpretation of the issue by the other speakers. Prof. Dey gave the instances of Surendranath Banerjee and Aurobindo Ghosh as two of the leading practitioners of ethical journalism in pre-independence India. He pointed out the fact that Bankimchandra Chattopadyay's reading of the courageous struggles of freedom fighter Vasudev Balwant Phadke, prompted the former to write the novel, 'Anandamath'. Prof. Dey cited the examples of the unveiling of the Bofors and the defence scams following the Kargil fights, as among the instances of ethical journalism in post-independence India.

Journalist Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya asked the budding journalists to abstain themselves from getting biased towards objectivity. Denouncing the trend towards 'infosensation', he asked the journalism students to set and follow their own guidelines for practising journalism. However, he was of the view that the Press Council should still be there as a guardian of mass media.
Defining the purposes of journalism as, to educate, to inform and to entertain, retired All India Radio journalist Sankar Dasgupta was of the opinion that society cannot be served without commitment to ethics. "Ethics arise from self-restraint", he said.

Columnist Swati Bhattacharya opined that the right to information should be inherent and imbibed in any democracy. Regarding adherence to ethics as a fetter in the case of collection of news, she pointed at the perpetual moral dilemma of journalists in the matter of suppressing information on humanitarian grounds.

Rounding off the enlightening seminar, Mass Media Centre President, Krishna Dhar advised the budding journalists to guard against allowing their news 'stories' become 'stories' in the common literal sense of the word. He had special praises for the resurgence of 'patriotic journalism' in a big way following the Gulf War of the 1990s.Journalism and Mass Communocation students of Surendranath College for Women took this opprtunity to release the National Press Day issue of their laboratory journal, 'Campus Sojourn'.