P. Sainath on Mass Media v. Mass Reality: From Farm and Field to Wall Street Deals

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Award-winning journalist P. Sainath - http://www.indiatogether.org/opinions/psainath/ - will speak on the failure of mass media to report and analyze the widening economic inequality in India and around the world. For the past decade, Sainath has been reporting on the epidemic of farmers committing suicide in India as a result of the collapse of the rural economy. Sainath's hard-hitting reporting for The Hindu newspaper forced other journalists to cover the story and government officials to act. A decade earlier, in the 1990s his dispatches from the countryside in the Times of India sparked a renewed interest in poverty in India. Those stories were published in his best-selling 1996 book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest Districts. In a 29-year career as a journalist, Sainath has won over 35 global and national awards and been called "the conscience of the Indian nation" by other journalists. In 2007, he won the Ramon Magsaysay Award -- Asia's most prestigious prize, often referred to as the "Asian Nobel" -- for Journalism Literature and Creative Communications Arts for his "passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India's national consciousness." The event is sponsored by the University of Texas School of Journalism, the South Asia Institute, AID-Austin, and the Society of Professional Journalists-UT. Location: University of Texas, Austin.

Produced for Austin Indymedia by Jeff Zavala.
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