According to Osho, healthy journalism nourishes body, mind, and soul; it creates a better humanity rather than merely transmitting events. News should be secondary to timeless, elevating content—great literature, art, and spiritual insight. The media’s responsibility is to cut politics down to size, shun trivial sensationalism, highlight qualities over personalities, and provoke leaders and readers toward growth, wisdom, and enduring value.
News should help people grow by sharing lasting wisdom, art, and goodness, not just chase crimes, gossip, or political hype.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, what is healthy journalism? Can journalism survive on positive news? Please explain your vision on the responsibility of the media.
Nandita, by healthy journalism, I mean journalism which nourishes the whole personality of man -- his body, his mind, his soul -- journalism whose whole concern is to create a better humanity, not just to report what is happening. Journalism should not be just a news medium, it should also be great literature -- then it is healthy. Even yesterday's newspaper should remain of some worth, so that even today it can be read. It should not be so momentary. But if you are only a news medium then naturally, once the day has passed, the news is old. You should make something that never becomes old, and always remains new. That's what great literature is. Dostoevsky's novels, or those of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, or Turgenev, Rabindranath Tagore ... they will remain significant as long as humanity remains, and as fresh as ever. Something in your journalism should have…
Question: BELOVED MASTER, I HAVE SPENT THREE BLISSFUL WEEKS HERE, AND NEXT WEEK I RETURN TO GERMANY. I AM NOT A SANNYASIN, BUT I HAVE AGAIN BEEN DEEPLY IMPRESSED BY THE GENUINE SPIRIT OF THIS COMMUNE AND BY YOUR DISCOURSES. IT WAS THE FIRST TIME I HAVE HEARD YOU SPEAK, AND YOUR WORDS HAVE GONE TO MY HEART AS WELL AS TO MY BRAIN. IN GERMANY I WILL BE CONFRONTED WITH DISCUSSIONS FROM MANY DIFFERENT SIDES, MOSTLY INFLUENCED BY THE PRESS, WHO ARE KNOWN FOR THEIR EXAGGERATIONS AND AN UGLY PLAY WITH SENSATIONAL NEWS. I WILL DO MY BEST TO DESTROY ANY MISUNDERSTANDING AND MISBELIEF, AND I AM GOING TO FIGHT AGAINST ANY LACK OF GOODWILL. BUT I EARNESTLY DOUBT WHETHER I WILL SUCCEED. WHAT DO YOU THINK I COULD DO? Intellectually, destruction is very easy. Intellectually, to lead people to a creative experience is impossible.
It should not live on sensationalism. It should not exploit people's ugly desires. They read about rape, they read about murder, they read about crime, and it is a wellknown psychological fact: while people are reading these things they somehow enjoy it. They also want to murder someone but they cannot. Reading about the murders, they become identified with the murderer. IF SOMEONE KILLS SOMEONE, THEN SHOULD IT BE REPORTED IN THE MEDIA OR NOT? My feeling is: if we want to change the human mind -- and it is an absolute necessity -- all that is evil should be ignored, because once you report it, it is magnified a millionfold. A small evil -- somebody kills someone -- reaches to millions of people; and every day they read that somebody is being killed, somebody is raped.
[NOTE: This is a typed tape transcript and has not been edited or published, as of August 1992. It is for reference use only. The interviewer's remarks have been omitted where not relevant to Osho's words] INTERVIEW WITH M. ARCHANA, NAWBHANATH, INDIA Q: WHAT IS YOUR MESSAGE FOR THE HUMANITY TODAY? A: Humanity has lived for thousands of years, and has got/now(*) a wrong notions, misconceptions, superstitions; and they have become its very bone, blood, its very marrow. It has completely forgotten that a child is born neither Hindu nor Mohammedan; neither Indian, nor American. We condition the child with a thousands of years of knowing and destroy his innocence. And the moment a child loses its innocence, he lives in futility. He cannot be himself, he has completely forgotten who he is, and he has been imposed by ideas which he is not.
Osho, are all the journalists blind? Can't they see the truth? Why are they continuously spreading lies about you?
A journalist is taught by his profession to always remain at a distance: "Look from the outside." And from the outside you can never know how things are. A pretty young woman was traveling in a train across Texas. A dapper looking man walked up to her and whispered something in her ear, whereupon she gave him a stinging slap in the face. A tall Texan seated across the aisle stood up and asked her, "Is this man molesting you, Ma'am?" "He certainly is," she replied. "He just offered me ten dollars if I would go with him to his sleeping compartment." Without hesitation, the Texan pulled out his pistol and shot the man. "Good God!" cried the woman. "That's no reason to kill him!" "I will kill any man," replied the Texan, "who tries to raise the prices in Texas." If you had looked only from the outside you…