In Britain, a proprietor is said to have observed recently that he could publish his Daily Express with 20 blank pages for all anyone would care as long as he continued to give away free CDs. Even the tabloids are on a steady slide downhill.

Come to India, we do things differently here. A burgeoning population, rising literacy rates, a ballooning economy ? it?s eyeball time for the print media here.

But ? and it is an important but for hacks like me who dabble in the colonial tongue ? the good news is in the ?vernaculars?. The numbers for English-language newspapers and magazines as a whole have started to dip. Or so the Indian Readership Survey 2005, Round 1, released last week, reportedly shows.

This even when all you have to do to qualify as a ?reader? is to have seen, yes seeing is enough, a masthead, may be one that someone was holding in the metro, the day before the surveyors come calling.

The bigger and older National Readership Survey will come out with its figures in April-end, but it won?t be surprising if this trend is reflected in that study too. Most readers I know have barely time to glance at the paper they pay good money for every day.

What will our readers do with a newspaper anyway? For information, they have, like their counterparts in the West, their 24-hour news channels and Net connections.

For understanding ? what understanding? Our readers, unlike those who are sending the Dainik Jagarans and Dainik Bhaskars zooming, look down upon politics, are embarrassed by social concerns, find policy issues boring, have absolutely no interest in anything that does not touch them here and now.

To them the traditional concept of a newspaper trying to make sense of the chaos around is as relevant as airconditioning in winter. The most they need from a newspaper is fun, timepass, page 3. But even they know that however entertaining it may be, it is also easily dispensable. And you know what, being part of a global trend is really no compensation for indifferent readers.

Nothing to expose

Methinks they protest too much. They being the galaxy of editors, anchors, columnists who are strangely unanimous in condemning India TV?s sexpos? as ?voyeurism? by ?peeping toms,? a ?desperate stunt? to raise TRPs, a ?cheap, reckless trick? that ?gives journalism a bad name?.

At the core of all the animadversion is one firmly-held conviction: ?However exploitative the casting couch, it is in the end about sex between two consenting adults and when someone hides a camera to film the act, it is the grossest possible invasion of privacy.? There is nothing ?illegal? in it, hence nothing to ?expose?.

In other words, you have every freedom to give up your hopes of ever making it in filmdom or to accept the casting couch as a fact of life no matter how gifted you are. That is the choice our media stars, the self-appointed guardians of our society, are ready to wink at.

Can it really be that so many celebrity journalists are truly unaware of the abuse of power they are condoning? Or is it because, as one of them has written with rare honesty, ?we can all be tempted or trapped into doing something silly and if someone broadcasts it he only shows that we?re human.? India TV does claim to have many more tapes waiting to be aired.