We did not have Television during my formative years. TV came to our household only when I was into my 20s. Even then we had only one channel - the drab DD. The news explosion with Cable TV came a decade later.
The only source of getting information was through the Newspapers and to some extend the Radio. The Newspapers, then, had good journalists who wrote pieces that had news and journalistic value. They were far from today's newspapers where one can, and does, a newspaper by copying and pasting news stories from internet. Father subscribed to three newspapers at home, and we read at least two more by exchanging with the neighbors.
I still have in my attic the notebook containing the clippings of the India-West Indies Cricket tour of 1975 and can recall the detailed constituency wise analysis of the General Election post emergency. We read with joy Indira Gandhi being beaten by Raj Narayan and Sanjay biting the dust. We learned about the exploits of Bjorn Borg and his epic struggle with John McEnroe. We were thrilled by the exploits of Sunil Gavaskar battling it out against the West Indian pace men.
Times have changed. The newspapers of today hardly have any in depth articles. The magazines are still worse. They are aimed at an audience that has brought up on a staple diet of Breaking News. The attention span of the viewers/readers is very small. No wonder we don't get to read long essays or articles with deep analysis any more.
I have moved with times and read a lot of online news papers. It makes economical sense too, as I live overseas.
The articles are shabby, poorly written and most of the online newspapers have strong political leanings. There is hardly any balanced writing any more, with a few exceptions. But I used to enjoy the comments section. The Letters to the Editor in a conventional news paper had limited space and only a select letters, heavily edited, were published. But the online comments can be endless, scathing, crude and brings out the carnal side of the people. Even highly educated people behave like one in the gutter. But at least it gave us a perspective of what a cross section of people think about a particular issue. And they were genuine people, who vented their true feelings.
But even that has changed. Now political parties have paid comment writers who troll on all online sites, which masks the genuine people who have moved away from these sites, like me. And there in lies the tragedy
