New Delhi: The Indian media, which faces the challenge of being more inclusive, needs to facilitate entry of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes into newsrooms as they have little representation there, Professor Robin Jeffrey, a leading authority on media affairs, said today.

Explaining what he construed as a serious challenge for the Indian media, Jeffrey said there are "newsrooms and broadcast studios which have almost no Scheduled Castes and Scheduled tribes amongst them on the editorial side."
"That means that close to one in every four Indians will not find anyone much like themselves writing stories, going to camera or making decisions about what is news," he added. Jeffrey, a leading academic known for his work `India`s Newspaper Revolution`, made these points at the Rajendra Mathur Lecture organised by the Editors` Guild of India whose President and senior journalist T N Ninan earlier welcomed him.
Jeffrey said that for a very long time Dalits and Tribals had continued to be away from the mainstream media and though anomaly had been noticed in the past, the problem had persisted.
He suggested Indians could act on the lines of what the American Society Newspapers Editors had done 35 years ago when they had begun an audit of African-Americans presence in the newsrooms and set target for a rough parity for minorities. "Annual audit of SC/ST presence in the newsroom and perhaps some very modest annual targets for inducting and bringing along journalists from such communities" could be a solution, he said.
Another suggestion Jeffrey gave was setting up of a trust for funding a "high quality publication, preferably a magazine, devoted to the issues surrounding the SC/ST experience".
PTI