The Centre for India and South Asia Research at SPPGA, in collaboration with the UBC School of Journalism, invites you to attend a talk by award-winning Indian journalist P. Sainath. Join us for his lecture entitled “Freedom of the Purse: Why the Indian Media Have a Structural Compulsion to Lie”.
India’s media once stood up to the mightiest empire in the world, but has shifted its loyalty to the side of power most aggressively, featuring giant scandals over ‘paid news’ and ‘private treaties’ between commercial media and corporate entities with regularity. The rapid concentration of power among corporate behemoths – including the gargantuan digital monopolies – has led to a growing disconnect between mass media and mass reality, with freedom being bestowed to the purse, not of the press.
About the Speaker:
P. Sainath has been a reporter for more than four decades and has covered rural India for over 30 years. He is the author of The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom and Everyone Loves a Good Drought. Sainath has won 70 national and international reporting awards and fellowships, including the Ramon Magsaysay Prize (2007). He is deeply involved in the training of journalists and has been teaching at the social communications media department of the Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, for 30 years, and also at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, since 2000. He was McGraw Professor of Writing in Princeton in 2012. Sainath is founder editor of the Peopleʼs Archive of Rural India (PARI), an independent multimedia digital platform that in 10 years of its existence has won over 70 journalism awards.
