Editorial

Dear readers
Assalamu alaikum. Hope you are keeping well even braving the chill of winter in different parts of the country. In winter, the affluent section of the society winters here and there but the poor segment of the same society struggles to cope up with the bone-chilling cold. When families suffer, the sufferings spill over to the children of the struggling families which bear, according to UNICEF, 71 per cent education cost of the children. Now in the wake of a hike in the cost of living, trouble doubles or triples for people of low-income groups. According to a BRRI research, people are compromising on their rice intake. The same segment earlier compromised on protein intake.

Dear subscribers
Like those of the poor section of society, the media industry across the world is not well. It is struggling on many fronts. Governments are containing the media either by gagging or by squeezing the advertisements even threatening the corporates who are giving advertisements to some dissent voices. The opposition parties are failing and thus are failing the media. Politicisation of media houses with the corporates buying the ownership of media houses which should have been owned by journalists themselves are some other problems plaguing the press. The Press, once proud of being the fourth estate or fourth power of the state, is losing the explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues. That’s why we have written a requiem for the media houses which are losing cultural diversity while recruiting and manning their houses. The regimes across the globe want the fourth pillar of the state to be ‘pillar of regime’ (PR) or public relation (PR). Hope the press or media will be synonymous with a prophet who tells the truth to the people in need and you will like the story.