shri vinod sharma - Rajya Sabha

enriching public opinion through no nonsense purveying of facts. That is where the
problem arises. If the ownership pattern has to be debated I don't know if it is
possible and whether any Government will have the political will or whether the
Government would be strong enough to take on the entire newspaper lobby which in
any case is very strong and which can co-opt with other people very easily in order
to pursue its interest. So, it is a very difficult task.
SHRI N. RAM: May I add that you can have some self-regulatory mechanisms both
for the industry and also within the media organisation. Take for example, the
institution of the readers' editor. If you take that from Guardian, The Hindu imported
it, and I would not dare use the word vernacular, I will play safe and say, Indian
Language Newspapers, although it is a very learned explanation by way of
digression that Mrinal gave us. Thank you for that. Why is there no demand for
doing this Don't you see some benefit coming out of that At least airing of
complaints, correction of mistakes and raising certain issues won't solve all the
problems but these good practices based on international experiences have to be
brought in through friendly coercion in the Indian media. Purely voluntarism is not
going to work. You have got to demand it.
SHRIMATI MRINAL PANDEY: I would like to go back to Sabina's original question.
There are two or three things. One is, the Hindi papers have high cover price. It
does not entirely cover the production cost but still it is much better at getting that
from the readers. To that extent cross subsidy pressures are less on Hindi. For
example, if one sells a 24 page Hindi paper for Rs. 5 in Bihar which is a poor
State but the sister daily sells for Rs. 1.50 which is twice as plump. Then, that also
creates a kind of a market situation. If they both belong to the same house, sooner
or later, pressures are going to come on the plump and thin alike because it is just
one house. I often compared Hindi papers of houses which have plump English
dailies to the daughter and son syndrome in the Hindu family. When the daughter