Journalism is all about neutrality. Any report, article, story or documentary found biased is being considered as yellow journalism and simultaneously affects the credibility of the journalists.
However, the biased reports in the present times have turned out to be a new syndrome within the media houses as the criteria to appoint the reporters and the other employees has gone for a toss, thus adding to the misery.
The mushroom growth of media outlets especially the social media pages have resulted in the rise in biased reports where only one side of the issue is being highlighted while the other is being ignored completely.
It was reported that the government will take action against the unregistered social media pages and other outlets. One fails to understand why the unregistered outlets are being allowed to go ahead as the lack of basics among them is not only creating a bad image among the local masses, but also affects the whole fraternity.
Such a situation could have been avoided if there would have been proper sessions within the media organizations, but unfortunately these conferences no longer exist and the apt culture of work has concurrently kept at bay.
In Kashmir where the government had provided a platform—Kashmir Press Club (KPC) where the sessions and workshops were being organized to train the budding journalists and make them aware about the news reports, articles and stories they file. Nonetheless, the building has also been taken back by the government, thus snatching a platform from the journalists where they could easily create a sense of unbiased reportage among the journalists.
In the present circumstances, the media outlets as well as the media men are being tagged with different names due to the biased reportage, thus putting the credibility of the whole journalist fraternity at stake.
There is a need to create a sense of unbiased reportage within the media organizations and ensure at least basics among the reporters and photojournalists so that the erroneous image is put to an end as well as the biased reports will not exist anymore.
Therefore, organizing the workshops at this juncture is the need of the hour, besides; the journalists working with different media outlets should refrain from publishing biased reports to ensure that the credibility of the whole fraternity is not put at stake.
