Tag Archives: News

Who Will Watch The Watch-dog?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

by Uday Kumar Varma

Former Secretary,  Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.

To believe that the overall conduct of the news media, in particular TV news Media, in the wake of the recent COVID epidemic is merely a transient aberration, will only reveal an ostrich-like approach, living in stark denial of what is staring us in the face. In ignoring the salience and propriety of issues that confront our news media space and the prevalent discourse that dominates this space these days – decidedly one of the most corrosive, difficult and depressing in recent times, will be perilous, to say the least.

Unfortunately, and ironically, most crises arise, perpetuate and even fester because many of us despite feeling resentment, frustration and even anger choose to be spectators and silent witnesses as grossly improper and unjust events happen around us and eventually overtake us. It is the silence of the sane and reasonable that pushes us down the abyss while a small, shouting and bullying minority decide and dictate; and rest of us choose to collectively suffer in silence, while individually and internally remaining discontented and uncomfortable. And it is true across every segment of society – politics, bureaucracy, academia, intelligentsia, civil society and of course news media. It has happened in the past; it happens even today and it will continue to happen in future as well, such is the nature of our intellectual and cerebral evolution.

History and our collective understanding of the growth of human civilization bear testimony to the fact that as far as freedom of expression and thoughts and ideas is concerned, the State shall never be able to either control or influence it for long. The nature of human intellect, freedom, innovation, endeavour and wisdom as also follies and foibles, ensure a free flow of thinking and an equally fierce desire and will to articulate it. No state can ever be able to control, subordinate or subjugate these desires, aspirations, tendencies, capacities and their free flowing expressions. Therefore, when we talk of news media content, the state shall be in the least effective position to offer an endurable and lasting mechanism to moderate or monitor content. Actually, it is news media itself that should find mechanisms to draw well thought out and defined ‘Lakshmana rekha’. Anyone else doing so will inherently invite resentment, refusal and rebellion. It is this aspect that needs appreciation when one discusses why industry should itself volunteer to effectively monitor content.

It will be foolishly and patently erroneous to argue, as a few among us may tend to believe and assert that sanity and propriety has taken leave of the news media world, that everyone in news media today thinks alike and are in broad agreement with the approach, attitudes and motives that dominate and decide the conduct of news media. Nothing can be more preposterous. There are very sensible elements and voices – many of them – not just a handful, who vehemently disagree with what news media is doing today. While most have chosen to strike silence and stoicism, many have voiced their concerns and worries and discomfort and apprehensions in private and at times but only occasionally, even openly. If only some of them are able to pluck enough courage and say what their conscience is constantly goading them to do so, the discourse will change. Or else it may as well continue on its present disastrous trajectory, much as the political philosopher Burke had warned, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.

It is possible to invent, create and sustain any narrative and propagate, peddle and sell it, howsoever far removed it may be from reality and truth. The Palestinian American historian Edward Said, author of the monumental ‘Orientalism’ called such possibility through ‘a whole structure of opinion and discourse’. If some among us can successfully create a subversive, corrosive and subjective perspective, the more intelligent and enlightened amongst us, can as well create a counter narrative- positive, hopeful, constructive, pacifying, and healing.

News media has always enjoyed a certain mystical ‘mojo’ – a magical charm that places her on a pedestal higher and different from others. She acts as a watch dog for everyone else and claims it as one of her basic and inherent rights and privileges. But who will be overseeing her own conduct and character? Who would do the course correction as and when it is required? To argue that news media is a power unto itself and beyond any scrutiny will be in denial of the basic and fundamental law of nature- a law that requires a balance of forces, powers and potentials- and without which neither the universe nor all that it encompasses could originate or exist. Media has the option to be its own watch dog. Is she willing to confront this reality and challenge and and make bold to resolve it?

My own logical conviction is that happen it eventually would! The challenge, of course, pivots around the issue of when and who must take the initiative in this direction.

Suppression And Separatism, Both Are Equally Condemnable By Humankind

Catelonia is the country first made in Spanish mindset that includes Catelans and non-Catelans alike. That is why Spanish government wants to prevent all outside people from forming any active understanding regarding the separatist subject, which has officially been suppressed by state.

Swiss government made an offer to mediate but that was refused by the Spanish government. Spanish law even prohibits news publishers from sharing abroad for free.

That is how even google news is not able to have any spanish news version. Local naturalness, formed only by the free will of individuals, is sustainable. Integrity of humankind is even then a globally valid greater fact of internet age that can never be superceded under no circumstance.

Suppression and separatism, both are equally condemnable by humankind. Sangkrit condemns apartheid in all formats.

SQOOP – Startup That Help Journalists Discover New Events, Data & Records For News

SQOOP is a startup as news discovery service, founded by Bill Hankes and David Kellum. The service is designed to help journalists find what’s interesting is going on before it really becomes the news. It does this by unlocking company information from public data websites.

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Complete WordPress News Manager Plugin By dFactory

News Manager is the brand new WordPress plugin by dfactory.eu. It not only adds a news post type but provides you many other features and customization options. The plugin lets you publish, manage and display news, manage date archives, quick AJAX Calendar, Categories, Tags and much more.

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How To Use A Live News Ticker Inside WordPress Post Types ?

You can easily place am ajaxified live ticker inside any of your WordPress Post, Page and other Custom Post Types using a simple shortcode [ticker].

Installation & Usage

First install and activate the new Liveticker WordPress Plugin. Upon activation the plugin adds a new menu ‘Liveticker’ in your admin section Dashboard:

  1. Create an initial Ticker Post and allocate it to the initiated Ticker. Now publish the Ticker Post.
  2. Open a post, page, CPT or whatever where you want to place your Ticker.
  3. Use the shortcode [ticker slug] in the text. Remember to replace the word slug with your actual ticker slug from the initiated Ticker you created in earlier step. Save the post.
  4. Now you can create Ticker Posts just by clicking Add New in the Ticker Post-Section.

Screenshot showing tick edit screen:

Screenshot showing content edit with ticker shortcode inserted:

Screenshot showing frontend look with the standard-settings:

Using this new menu you can easily create and manage tickers, you can set ticker refresh interval time, use custom CSS and use own RSS-Feeds for each ticker you created, you can initiate unlimited tickers on your Posts; not in a single post, but in different posts.

Easily Dispay News Bulletin In A Lightbox Overlay In WordPress

WP News Bulletin allows you to publish news as a CPT and display them in a sliding sidebar widget, when a news headline is clicked it gets displayed in a lightbox overlay from where your users can read full news articles.

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Beautiful & Customizable Flash Powered RSS Ticker For WordPress

7feeds ticker is a beautiful and highly customizable RSS ticker widget plugin for WordPress site owners. The widget allows you to display vertically scrolling external and internal RSS feeds (via URLs), you can display multiple feeds from different URLs, you an use various color themes, customizeble colors, fonts, titles, dimensions and other advanced scrolling options. It loads immediately and works smoothly.

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StopWatching.US, A Website To Have Your Voice Heard And Get More Information On What US Government Is Doing

Mozilla with a group of other powerful organisations launched a new website with address StopWatching.US. It is an online campaign created to get US Congress to question executive branch about the misuse of their powers. The campaign is now supported by various powerful organisations like Reddit, American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation and altogether there are 86 organizations including companies.

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How To Engage Readers By Displaying Google News Related To Your Blog Posts In WordPress ?

After you post your articles you can automatically display latest news related to your content in your WordPress site as a sidebar widget. Google News Widget is a simple but powerful WordPress widget plugin that activates a configurable widget for each of your post showing related news article links from Google News depending upon your post tags and categories.

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Quick & Easy Way To Add Extensible News Post Type In WordPress

News CPT is a powerful and complete WordPress plugin that allows you to publish news article from your WordPress blog. All news posts are added as custom post types and are accessible with address YourDomain.Com/NEWS. It also provides you a news taxonomy and is compatible with default taxonomies like tags and categories in your weblog. The plugin activate a sidebar widget which you can use for displaying recent news items.

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Get WordPress News & Resources From 30+ Contributing Sites To Your Dashboard Home

If you are a blogger or you like reading about WordPress news, tutorials and other resources then you can add a simple dashboard widget (Dashboard -> Home) showing new WordPress articles and news from over 30 contributing websites.

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Allow Your WordPress Blog Readers To Send Content To Their Kindle Devices And Apps

Now you can add a Send to Kindle button with in your WordPress blog posts and allow your readers to send your post content to their Kindle devices and apps so that they can read it afterwards anytime they like. This can be easily done by using brand new WordPress plugin Send to Kindle which is now available in WordPress Plugin Repository.

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Display Quotes, Testimonials And Other Rotating Content Snippets In WordPress

Flexi Quote Rotator is a popular WordPress plugin you can use for displaying quotes, testimonial and other rotating content snippets in different ways (widget, PHP Function or Shortcode) and using different styles in your WordPress based website.

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Display Random Images As Background In WordPress At Each Visit Or As Timed Slideshow

Background Manager is a popular WordPress plugin that allows you to display random image as your WordPress websitebackground at each visit or as a timed slideshow without editing any theme file. The plugin lets you create a number of set of images from where an image is grabbed and displayed as your website‘s background. You can use your media library images, upload them from your computer or import them from third party sources. A live demonstration of Background Manager plugin is available at Background Manager Demo Site.

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How To Add Facebook Type News Ticker In WordPress Displaying Multi-Functional Data ?

You might have noticed while using Facebook it displays a news ticker showing recent live activities of your friends circle on the top right corner of your Facebook Account’s Home Page. If it is yet not visible in your FB’s homepage then may be you haven’t clicked Show Ticker Button, a tiny button present on the same top right corner.

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Make Education OPEN, FREE, FLUID AND LIVE

Increasing Internet usage can upgrade education everywhere as world-class so that everyone will sure be getting that world-class education in complete freedom. Therefore collaboratively configuring and validating fluid courses in dominant web-technologies free as in freedom, we are improving Internet life to make education open, free, fluid and live.

We Are Improving Internet Life

We repeatedly run out of our resource limit due to continuously growing numbers of netizens from all countries visiting our domain. Now crowd-funding is the way ahead. We are not afraid of it but are more than willing to learn via this humbling that what is permitted here and what not. Open-sourcing and crowd-funding are inherent characteristics of Internet.

Reciprocating your interest no other perks could do better than public freedom to read us for free whenever someone needs to know something. Concurrently we hit almost:

  • 2,567,073+ monthly page views via 558,059+ visitors
  • 30,804,870+ yearly page views via 6,696,711+ visitors
  • 68,600+ Google Possibilites

View Complete Report here and Alexa web ranking here. We work 24×7 and all the time create better technology tutorials, encouraging newbie developers by reviewing their plugins and apps for free, interviewing Internet entrepreneurs (view example) who are working on some unique idea on their domain for enhancing utility of Internet.

And Now We Need Your Participation

We have been online for 3 years & 3 months, getting popular up to extent of reaching our resource limits so now need your participation

  • for expanding our resource limits to keep us free forever
  • for improving our globally distributed pattern of webcasting
  • for making web-authors much more focused by paying them better
  • for facilitating other utilities on Internet to benefit from popularity of sangkrit.net

to make lamp.sangkrit.net more supportive to other great projects at Sangkrit.Net like:

  • Universal Free Education System that can upgrade education everywhere as world-class even upon simple usage by end-users so that everyone will sure be getting that world-class education in complete freedom..
  • Ultimate Political Machine for running Direct Democracy abolishing all representations.
  • Internet Checkup Center of Top Level Domains at Home Page of Sangkrit.Net
  • Mega-Universe of inter-related Private Networks where netizens may themselves create their own powerful networks like facebook and twitter in just a few clicks.

You may contact for any more information. Contacting us or contributing for us requires only one address. That is freedom@sangkrit.net as our absolute message to all netizens as well as our preferred way of communication via e-mail and transaction via PayPal.

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Support Keith Curtis To Finish “Software Wars”, A Movie About How We Can All Have Cars That Drive Us Around

Story: The average computer user is unaware there is a war for freedom going on that will determine the path of modern society. Software Wars is a movie about the battle for our right to share technology and ideas.

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Easily Display Your Blog Author Avatars List Anywhere In Your WordPress Site

Bloggers running a multi-author WordPress blog can display avatar list of their site authors using a widget or shortcode. Here are two WordPress plugins that allows you to do so very easily.

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