OP-ED: No push-button to achieve press freedom

What is the state of journalism in the country? 

This is certainly not a happy time for the media in Bangladesh. To my mind, for two reasons. One, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of journalists as well as other employees of news organizations have lost their jobs without any hope to be re-employed in any other organization. 

And two, very recently, the news treatment of a woman’s unnatural death in Dhaka’s Gulshan district has cast a phenomenal shadow on the credibility of our media.

I haven’t seen the media to be so critically viewed in my entire professional life. Tens of thousands of our audience and readers were seen openly coming out with enormous black bile against the press. I was overcast with sadness. Yes, simply because I have spent most of my professional years as a journalist, and I still bear an admiration for the profession.