Three days before India’s 71st Independence Day, Sashi Kumar—the civil face of Indian television (when Doordarshan was the channel around) and the man who started India’s first private news channel Asianet—made an outstanding speech on the state of the media at the ‘Festival of Democracy’ in Calicut, Kerala.

Broadly, he says, Indian media, especially brain-dead mainstream English TV channels, have reduced themselves to the role of hounds who precede the hunters; have abdicated their allegiance to the Constitution of India; have given up their ability to see what they; and have normalised the abnormal and abnormalised the abnormal.

“Donald Trump calls the US media he doesn’t like as ‘fake news’. Actually, he should be using that label for Indian media.”

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