Dr. Kundan Aryal -
The concluding sentence of Power Without Responsibility: The press, broadcasting, and new media in Britain, a seminal work by James Curran and Jean Seaton, seems to be a utopia in the present chaotic world of media. In the book first produced in the 1980s and then updated in the new millennium, the duo hopes that we can build a better media system that combines power with the responsibility to people. They attempt to pursue an idea to enable the media to perform functions like informing, discussing, mirroring, binding, campaigning, challenging, entertaining and judging in a free society. To translate the noble idea into practice, a society requires the mass media primarily powered by their independent and responsible functioning.
As in the global context, for about a decade, online news portals are exponentially proliferating in Nepal. Press Council Nepal (PCN) states that as many as 2,664 online news portals are operating in the country to make the general public informed at least in principle. However, in practice, journalists working in these news portals are yet to realise their critical role in the democratic polity and society. It is believed that the free internet and its offspring such as news portals enable a society in promoting freedom of speech. The value of free speech has been evaluated greatly in a democratic society, as it produces informed voters. Read Dr. Kundan Aryal's article on The Rising Nepal.
