“The media this,” “the media that”–it’s all we’re ever talking about. So I figured professor Dr. Kalyani Chadha, whose research focuses on issues of media globalization, would have much to say on the topic.
She received her bachelor’s degree from Delhi University, her master’s from Jawaharlal Nehru University and her Ph. D. at the University of Maryland. Dr. Chadha is a co-founder of the Journalism Interactive Conference and also directs the Media, Self and Society Scholars Program.
Here is what she had to say about journalism and media-related topics:
Q: Why did you decide to focus on the media as your area of expertise?
A: I grew up always interested in the news. I grew up in a household that was very news-oriented; my mother had been a journalist and news discussions, discussions of politics, were very typical in our house. Then as an undergraduate and even at the master’s level I studied history. While I was studying, I started to write for a local paper, and I figured I really liked it, not that I lasted long in that profession, but I did enjoy it a lot. Then I thought, I am just going to combine my interests. I had a lot of academic interest, I liked research, so everything came together in that. But I think it was mainly because I grew up in a household where there was a lot of discussion of the role that media played in the way we think about the world.
Q: Do you foresee careers in journalism becoming less desirable due to all the backlash journalists receive now?
A: No I don’t actually, I think in some ways this has been a time where people are waking up and saying, “Hey journalism matters!” Even a couple of years ago people would say, “Oh it’s all dying, what are they going to do … people are just interested in social media,” and actually people are interested in social media, but I think a lot of people are waking up and realizing what a really important role journalists can and do play in the world. So much goes on and we would never know it without them. So I do think that there is a shift; I’m not saying that it miraculously solves all the economic problems of journalism and how to pay for things. I think a lot of people are now drawn to journalism in a way that they were after Watergate. People saw what journalism could do to change something that is corrupt and broken. So I am wondering if that is going to have the same effect. I don’t know for sure, but I think there are a lot of young people who are consuming a lot more news than I would have ever suspected.
Q: Where do you get most of your news from?
A: I would say the Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic and The New Yorker. I stay away from Twitter because I feel like all it does is raise my blood pressure and I’m still of the generation where I like long stories.
Q: Do you feel that journalists today have a looser sense of ethics than they once did?
A: No I don’t, but part of the problem is, who is a journalist? There was a time where it was very clear who a journalist was in the last 30 or 40 years. The profession had pretty clearly limited boundaries of who a journalist was. Now you have all these people who write about news and they aren’t always trained in how to write ethically and how to operate ethically. But if you look historically, ethical standards were much looser. The problem is not that professional journalists have looser standards, but I think the problem is that there are a lot of people who are not trained in that way, and their standards are not what we would like them to be.
Q: If there was something you could change about the news outlets what would it be?
A: I wouldn’t change the news outlets, but I wished they had reacted differently to the internet. When the internet first started, all this news content was free. I wish they could have been more imaginative, I wish they would have looked forward instead of saying, “Oh this is this thing on the side and we aren’t going to pay attention to it.” And then it was too late, and I think now we are in this stage where we are thinking, “How do you pay for things?”