At one moment during the protests at Jantar Mantar this week, a legacy television media journalist, holding a red mic flag, was conducting an interview, when a bunch of protesters surrounded her and began to clap. Although the journalist peddled her dummy questions, shrill cries of ‘godi media’ left her inaudible. And red-faced.
Throughout these protests, independent media and brave citizen journalists denounced, or countered, the work of traditional media houses. In his 1922 book, Public Opinion, journalist Walter Lippmann coined the phrase ‘manufacture of consent’. Here, he feared that a public could never see the real world only via images handed to it by a media gatekeeper who stood between the citizen and an event.
