Despite the fact that the Government’s chief media interface, bombastically redesignated as Principal Director General (Media & Communications), Frank Noronha, having all the media friendly attributes of a competent official media professional with a pleasant disposition and ability to perform unpleasant job with pleasure, situation on the ground is not improving. The reasons are three fold: acute manpower crunch, dependency on outsourcing and lack of right initiatives and self-drive in the present breed of information officers, known as departmental publicity officers, who cannot drive developmental publicity. They are typical bureaucrats, at their best, and information managers, at their worst.
Multi-lingual publicity through PIB’s regional and branch offices across the country is virtually in a moribund stage, driven by acute shortages of information personnel, dependency on outsourced poor quality translation works, and late hours delivery of information to language and vernacular media. So it is all counter productive. There is complete black out of the Government of India related information in the regional and vernacular media. If any information is there, it is only negative.
It is learnt, PIB’s terms of engagement have now expanded to turn more and more responsive and reactive to social and electronic media, especially TV Channels. In the process, the Bureau has swerved from its primary tasks of dissemination of official developmental information and concentrating more and more on feedback. PIB’s publicity officers are unable to take lead media personnel individually in confidence to brief them exclusively on developmental issues in order to generate public goodwill for the Government.
It is learnt from the official sources in the Department of Information Technology that PIB consumes about seven gigabytes of information every day by way of scrutinising social media, print media and electronic media monitoring report from the Electronic Media Monitoring Centre, which currently monitors round the clock over 800 TV Channels and is poised to cover 1500 TV Channels by 2017. It is amazing PIB is able to process and make sense or non-sense of it all. This is its plight in the age of information overload. Information overload refers to the notion that PIB is trying to take in more of counter narrative than its crunched manpower can handle. In such a scenario, information overload leads to decision fatigue rendering the Bureau less and less useful to media personnel.
The present plight of the Bureau together with the overall gagging of the free media from interacting with senior officials in the corridors of power, as also Ministers in the Government except one, have created a regimented flow of information, a fascist streak, putting a lid on free flow of information, thus denying the people of India their sovereign right to know happenings in the Government in its correct perspective, pointing to a total damages to free media with all their ills as an assured and guaranteed vibrant rule of the law based democratic system of governance!
India
PIB’s Pro-active Counter Narrative Turning Unproductive
M.Y.Siddiqui - 2015-10-15 10:28
With the expanding role of electronic and social media in the affairs of the NDA Government at the Centre, the work culture in the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the prime official media for dissemination of all official information and publicity, has undergone a major shift towards counter narrative in the form of rejoinder, rebuttal and clarification from its basic tasks of dishing out developmental information. The result has been enough blank space in the media world to file negative and adversarial news, in the absence of increased developmental information, so much so that only negative sentiments are generated in the public against the Government. And PIB’s pro-active counter narrative is not helpful at all.