Reporting news or promoting superstition?
I recently read in a national newspaper that two of our TV news channels have been issued notices by some court for mis-use of their channel to promote superstition. I, for one was very happy to note that.
The question raised was the recent LHC(Large Hadron Collider) experiment and the so called prediction of doomsday.Many TV channels displayed rampant and dramatized news programmes on how the world would come to a catastrophic end. In fact, due to this one village girl even committed suicide. Ignorance has it price, after all.
But I would like to take it back further by about a month or so, when almost whole of India experienced a partial Solar Eclipse.
One news channel(happens to the one which I dislike the most) went as far as prescribing ways to prevent the ill effects of this Solar Eclipse on pregnant ladies. The solution prescribed was to smear a layer of cow dung mixed with cow urine over the abdomen during the eclipse. And the TV channel hired some ‘renowned’ astrologer to promote this gimmick. It made me sick to the core and I felt ashamed on our very existence as Indians.
On one hand, we boast of launching 10 satellites with a single rocket and on the other, we have weird notions about things we do not understand. Or rather about things we do not *want* to understand.
These news channel rather than play their part in removing ignorance and promoting scientific temper, are doing more damage than ever possible. With the reach of DTH (Direct-to-Home) broadcasts to interior villages across India, one can only think of the devastation these bogus broadcasts are causing.
And given the irony, that the whole notion of eclipses as per Indian astrology is based on the existence of another planet called ‘Rahu’ which in fact does not exist and is nothing but the Moon’s orbit intersecting the earth’s orbit in space. So much for this so called ’science’, huh?
I would really love these news channels being brought to justice. Enough damage is already done. But future damage should be prevented.
~Seemanta
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