Telephone

CGNet Swara

If you know someone who was part of a media-covered Occupy protest, as I do, you probably learned the disconcerting reality behind what may at one point just have been a nagging suspicion: The "news" is rarely completely accurate and needs to be taken with more than a grain of skepticism. Not too long ago, that reality was highlighted for me when I watched and read the coverage of an incident with which I was personally involved. The misstatements and fanciful embellishments ~ mostly, it seemed, in an effort to make a story more exciting ~ were almost laughable.
   In a part of India whose residents own, for the most part, only one piece of recent communications technology ~ a mobile phone ~ a journalist has created a news network driven by the people themselves. "If we want to live in a peaceful society," he says, "it is not enough for our elections to be democratic. We need for the media to be democratic as well, so that everybody, all of us, has a say in deciding what issues are going to be discussed, not just a few wealthy media proprietors and their chosen editors" (story, video): http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/innovators/2014/06/140617-shubhranshu-choudhary-india-maoists-citizen-journalism/
   P.S., The journalist, Shubhranshu Choudhary, won Google's Digital Activism Award this year: http://www.mid-day.com/articles/make-media-democratic-says-2014-google-digital-activism-award-winner-shubhranshu-choudhary/15176063

Shubhranshu Choudhary

Shubhranshu Choudhary: http://www.mid-day.com/articles/make-media-democratic-says-2014-google-digital-activism-award-winner-shubhranshu-choudhary/15176063