Disrupted Media Entrepreneurship and News Industry in Blind Alley

 
Media outlets all over the world are currently devising different strategies to sustain their fame and acceptability in the middle of the augmentation of Artificial Intelligence or AI tools. Countries which will be able to keep pace with this innovative sprint faster can only stay on in the race while countries which cannot generate efficient and sustainable technicalities on time have to drop out of the competitive circumference that surrounds us.
In countries like Bangladesh, we can see that media houses often run into different hurdles. Media entrepreneurship in countries like ours often get disrupted and the entire news industry faces insurmountable challenges to work independently. As a result of frequent impediments posed by state organs, financial doldrums, political intervention, hostile tagging, antagonism from different quarters, newspapers are thrust into a blind alley where everything seems to have reached a point of no return. This is a perilous scenario for news industry and it heavily interrupts freedom of expression. Good governance, rule of law and socioeconomic justice cannot be established without freedom of press and people's liberty to speak out their opinions without fears.

The immediate pas government was ousted on 5 August 2024. An interim government led by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus took oath on 8 August 2024. More than one year has already elapsed. The interim government constituted several reform commissions but the outcome of the activities and functions of these commissions are absolutely vague and not remarkable at all. Most of the pupils in schools, colleges and universities throughout Bangladesh have very poor English language proficiency and the educational standard in our academia is also impaired and substandard for the most part. No reform commission has been launched by the interim government to upgrade the education system of Bangladesh which is very unfortunate.

Media outlets come under repression and enforced confinements when authoritarian governments rule a country. A lot of journalists and media house owners were harassed and endangered in squalid ways by abusing power during the ousted ruling party's years in power. Famed economist and former Finance Secretary Dr. Akbar Ali Khan was unanimously the most sagacious and visionary scholar who had the acumen and far-sight to pull out Bangladesh from the debris and pangs of misgovernance, corruption and irregularities. Dr. Akbar Ali Khan also served as Cabinet Secretary and a caretaker government's Finance Adviser. He was a valiant freedom fighter too. I was closely associated with Dr. Akbar Ali Khan which is why I met him at least twice a month while he was Chairman of the Regulatory Reform Commission. It was painful and depressive that no official condolences were issued when Dr. Akbar Ali Kan passed away a couple of years ago. No state honour was paid to him during his burial. No effort is being made to pick lessons from Dr. Akbar Ali Khan's economic analysis and elaborations either.

There is almost no sound from the interim government about rejuvenating and improving the quality of education in Bangladesh. Nobody is saying a single word about the Kudrat-E-Khuda Education Commission or mainstreaming Bangladesh's dissected educational pathways like merging together Bengali and English mediums, madrassas, technical schools, colleges, institutes etcetera. Without qualified and sufficiently skilled youths in foreign languages and information and communication technology (ICT), Bangladesh will find it extremely hard to march forward. It's not at all clear to us what steps are being initiated to deal with the challenges that come from the spread of Artificial Intelligence. Nobody knows what is being done by educationists, academic experts and the ministries concerned to make our youths fit to adapt to the advent of AI, blockchain technology and other similar sophistications in the field of communicative improvisations.

Media outlets were over and over again subjected to unfair regimentation by intelligence departments and law and order forces in the past and we can't say for sure whether we are yet totally free of those bleak days or not. Political parties who ruled Bangladesh cracked down hard on newspapers which did not flatter the ruling class. Many newspapers still have huge sums of unpaid bills which have not been yet disbursed but it's very sad that the present rulers have not yet taken up any concrete actions to recover the ailing news industry from financial woes. Seems like everyone has forgotten about the fact that news industry is the fourth pillar of democracy.

Some of the highly valued journalists in Bangladesh's news arena can be recalled in this context like Hamidul Huq Chowdhury, Ahmed Humayun, Al Mahmud, Shafik Rehman, Mahfuz Ullah, ABM Musa, Shahadat Chowdhury, Bazlur Rahman and so on. In the ongoing era Mahfuz Anam belonging to The Daily Star and Matiur Rahman leading Prothom Alo are acclaimed journalists. Even after the downfall of the previous tyrannical government, political tagging and staining newspapers or other media houses with trademarks like foreign countries' agents, collaborators, middlemen etcetera is still going on viciously. For this reason the all out circumstances for honest, courageous and competent journalists to prosper are very obscure, jittery and narrow.

On the other hand, some newspaper owners gobbled up enormous amounts of bank loans in Bangladesh during the overthrown government's ruling period. The interim government or the ministries interrelated with this phenomenon have not yet told us categorically whether it is being investigated which media tycoons borrowed how much money from banks and siphoned off these funds to overseas locations. However, there are lots of transparent and law-abiding entrepreneurs who run newspapers with utmost financial integrity but these days some of them are also being targeted by certain vindictive political quarters and corrupt state agencies. Several journalists have been detained by law and order forces, beaten up and killed by mob gangsters during last one year or so.

Popular and classic newspapers like Daily Ittefaq, Dainik Sangbad, weekly magazines Jai Jai Din, Bichitra, Bichinta and another few publications shaped up the thoughts and creative faculty among youths during the previous decades. It was observed with dismay that during the Covid 19 pandemic, no stimulus packages were rolled out for mass media in Bangladesh. An economic nosedive is currently going on which has once again jeopardized newspapers which is why profound attention from the interim government is required to save financially hazarded newspapers from further losses and damage. Another point should be noted that an evil faction of bureaucrats have caused widespread harm to mass media, good governance and professional uprightness during the tenures of all ruling parties in Bangladesh's history. The reform commissions have not yet been able to show a single instance of correcting one or two state machineries while time is running out. The ray of hope that flashed on the horizon when Dr. Muhammad Yunus became Chief Adviser is gradually fading out, I am afraid. While concluding the write-up, a few words from Pope Francis can be quoted who once said "Every man, every woman who has to take up the service of government, must ask themselves two questions: 'Do I love my people in order to serve them better? Am I humble and do I listen to everybody, to diverse opinions in order to choose the best path.' If you don't ask those questions, your governance will not be good."