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        In his classic work 'Public Opinion', published in 1922, Walter Lipman distinguished between 'the world outside and the pictures in our minds'. He defined a 'stereotype' as an over simplified pattern that helps us find meaning in the world. He said all of us carry stereotypes in our heads of large and varied classes of people like 'Englishmen', 'Germans', 'Negroes', 'Hindus', 'Parsis' etc. Lipman argued that the Stereotype satisfies our needs and helps us defend our prejudices. Stereotypes, extremely simple and easily grasped images of racial or national or religious groups are only another example of pseudo-events. Generally speaking they are akin to propaganda. For they simplify rather than complicate. Daniel J Boorstin sums it up clinchingly: 'Stereotypes narrow and limit experience in an emotionally satisfying way; but pseudo-events embroider and dramatize experience in an interesting way. This itself makes pseudo-events far more seductive; intellectually they are more defensible, more intricate, and more intriguing. To discover how the stereotype is made-to unmask the sources of propaganda-is to make the stereotype less believable. Information about the staging of a pseudo-event simply adds to its fascination'.
 

Today in India the flood of pseudo-events released by the organized mafia of mass media has made experience newly and satisfyingly elusive. In this new era in India today there is a surging and growing demand for NEWS as a crying primal need of the mind, like the hunger of the body. This mania for news is both a symptom and outcome of a revolution of rising expectations enlarged far beyond the capacity of the natural world to satisfy. This calls for a synthetic product. It has stirred an irrational and undiscriminating hunger for fancier, newer and more varied items. Stereotypes have always been and will never cease to be. Stereotypes serve only as an opiate. Pseudo events, on the other hand, whet our primordial appetites. They arouse our news hunger endlessly in the very act of satisfying it.         What makes pseudo-events more exciting and thrilling than actual events? What makes pseudo-events overshadow spontaneous events? What are the characteristics of pseudo-events being let loose as guided missiles by the mafia of mass media in India today? The cardinal features of pseudo-events can be summed up as follows:         a) Pseudo-events are more dramatic. The most classic example of a supersonic pseudo-event is the programme called "The Big Fight" being continuously organised and presented by NDTV. Controlled and doctored debate between carefully chosen and selected 'TV Para Troopers' can be made to look more suspenseful by reserving questions for a while to be popped up suddenly like an undermining operation to overwhelm the gullible public.     b) Pseudo-events are easier to disseminate and to make vivid. The same participants are repeatedly selected for their perceived 'newsworthy' and 'dramatic' interest.         c) Pseudo-events can be repeated at will, and thus their impression can be re-enforced. Pseudo-events let loose by the mass media serve as inebriating chewing gums of the mind, heart and soul of the people and the Nation.

              d) Pseudo-events cost money to create. There is always a commercial interest in disseminating, magnifying, advertising and extolling them as events worth watching or worth believing. Therefore pseudo-events are advertised in advance and continue to run and rerun in order to get money's worth.

        e) Pseudo-events are more sociable, conversable and more convenient to witness. Their occurrence is commercially planned for our convenience everyday.

        f) Knowledge of pseudo-events-of what has been reported and staged, and how- becomes the test of being 'well informed'. The saddest part of the story is that pseudo-events have come to provide the ground of reliable and durable common discourse replacing the role played by the Great Books of the world for centuries!! g) Pseudo-events like malarial flies spawn other pseudo events in interminable and geometric progression. The new Gresham's Law of Indian public life is that counterfeit happenings manufactured by the pseudo-secular mafia of print and TV mass media are driving spontaneous happenings or events out of circulation. Once we have tasted the charm of pseudo-events, we are tempted to believe they are the only important events. Our own progress poisons the life-giving sources of our experiences. And the poison becomes so sweet that it spoils our appetite for plain fact

        The anti-national role played by mass media in India became patently clear during the Vande Mataram controversy. Editors and publishers miserably failed to distinguish between objectivity and neutrality. While it is the sacred Dharma of editors to be objective, yet it imposes no obligation on them to be neutral in the battle between treasonable separatism and patriotic nationalism. To quote the appropriate words of Swapan Dasgupta: 'My own experience suggests that breaking the stultifying liberal consensus is a daily exercise in guerrilla warfare. In the aftermath of globalisation, the liberal consensus has veered round to a contrived expression of cosmopolitanism. Fond belief that competitive democracy would force publications to recognise the force of Hindu disquiet has turned out to be horribly misplaced. The term of the NDA Government, for example, saw yesterday's pro-Congress newspapers being feted and flattered by representatives of the very government whose formation they had so uncompromisingly resisted'. The two endemic diseases of mass media in India are:

        a) The 'anti-Hindu' bias of both the print and electronic media.

        b) Secularism in India has come to mean only an uncritical celebration of minority interests and a corresponding denigration of "Hindu" interests).

        Indian politicians, as a class, have devised clever and devious. strategies to use media influence to their advantage and they range from harmless spin doctoring-which, in the Indian context, also means blatant intimidation-to plain bribery. These vicious political strategies have also been refined and adopted by corporate houses, leading to the emergence of a strange breed of so-called professionals-the public relations and communications experts whose sole job is to be the interface with the media.

        Most of the pseudo-secular reporters in the world of mass media, despite their fine talk of objectivity, only mildly approach objectivity through the form in which they write their news in a soullessly technical style which requires them to be much dumber and more innocent than in fact they are. So they write in a bland uncritical and lifeless way which gives greater credence to the utterances of Cabinet Ministers, politicians and public officials, no matter how stupid or mindless those utterances are.

        We had nationalist newspapers in different parts of India during the days of our struggle for freedom. They had their own clearly defined patriotic ideology and national vision. But alas! Today the media owners and editors view themselves as 'professionals' which only means working as paid prostitutes of either the Congress party or the Communist Party or some other regional Dravidian Party. Ideology has been overthrown by considerations of money, profit and commerce. Consequently the entire media have become aimless, , pointless, directionless and soulless. Everything held sacred before 1947 has become profane and everything considered as sacrilegious before 1947 has become psedo-secularly sacred in the mafia world of mass media in our country today. Consequently, the most disgraceful aspect of the English-Language Media is that it is guided, moulded and maneuvered by newspapers abroad like The Guardian of England and New York Times of USA.

        To quote the inimitable words of Swapan Dasgupta once again: "Obviously, the liberal consensus means one thing in the United Kingdom and the United States and something quite different in India. Whereas in the anglophile world, the symbol of liberalism is multiculturalism, in India the liberal consensus has veered round to a slightly skewed version of secularism. If multiculturalism abjures the Anglo-Saxon and Christian heritage of the English-speaking world, secularism in India has come to mean an uncritical celebration of minority interests and a corresponding denigration of 'Hindu' interests."

        A centralised and concentrated system of information in our democracy has come to pass. The mainstream media, despite their pious insistence that they never select their output for self-serving reasons, are very close to being absolute in their self-censorship on the subject. They are vigorously copious with reports of the dangers to our democracy of information control by Governments. But they are diplomatically silent on the dangers of private and cartel control. While Governments can be voted out of office, these cartels controlling mass media, through their stranglehold control of news and public information pose a serious threat to our infant democracy by postponing public awareness for dangerously long periods.

        The mass media in India remains largely a Congress controlled propaganda machine. As the Congress has not been able to win elections, it has encouraged and promoted its media wing even more strongly to try to compensate for its political failures in the electoral arena. Yet as the Congress party itself has often failed, the media has taken to supporting other leftist groups inside and outside the country in the hope of gaining power. I can see the clear hand of western governments in manipulating the Congress party to do its work. This shows how the surrogate Manmohan Singh Indian government is being manipulated as a puppet of the western governments today as indeed it has been for a long time during the last 40 years.

        What our country badly and sadly requires today cannot be put better than in the words of that unmatched journalist from USA called Joseph Pulitzer(1847 –1911) 'An able, disinterested, public spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalism of future generations.'