Privy

We all know how negative our media has become these days. Bad news is flashed whole day and any good news (other than cricket) fails to make the cut for the decision makers who prefer sensational non-news over really impactful developments.

khushkhabari.com is a unique concept where in news is collected from various sources and ordered according to how good it is. A news is determined as good depending upon how the sites users feel about it: good or bad. The about page of the site mentions its inspiration in Dr. A.P. J Abdul Kalam’s speech on Israeli media.

A news had appeared on the site (through Yahoo! News) which talked about a Meghalaya village being rated as the cleanest in Asia. Now this is a news that most of us have likely missed. Imagining a village in India being cleanest is Asia is really a feel good news.

The site’s success, however, depends upon its users. Just like wikipedia, if its users don’t vandalize the news ratings, it might be a very useful source of good news.

NDTV was always better than the rest of the news media, until recently, but now as a part of commercialization perhaps, has joined the crowd. I can recall atleast two instances today while watching the Mumbai attacks coverage, where I really cursed NDTV and switched to Times Now.

They were showing the scenes of rescuees coming out of Oberoi and the media people trying desperately to get a word out of them. Immediately, the correspondent communicates by the phone and says “we tried to chase down the rescued people (a tone of confidence), however they were not willing to talk us (a tone of complaining) …”

Then they carried out a statement by an army chief in which he refused to give the count of casualties in the army, for obvious reasons of maintaining the morale. However, this channel reports “NSG casualty count unestimable…”

Similar thing had happened on Times Now, but the news anchor Arnab  politely advised restrain to the correspondent and the camera man. Times Now, today is the most responsible news channel (still they could improve) among the lot. I never ever switched to Aaj Tak or India TV who are glorifying the terrorist by carrying out his interview.