Hazare’s belated endorsement of G.D. Agrawal, the dean of India’s environmental engineers, shows how desperate the good-government zealots of his “Team Anna” have become since their movement briefly shook India and then deflated.

Last summer, Hazare and his minions were riding high on a media amplified movement to ram a utopian anti-corruption law through parliament. Their short-lived agitation for the creation of an all-powerful anti-graft ombudsman position began, fittingly enough, with a four-day fast by Hazare that received saturation news coverage.

High on the attention, Hazare and his people couldn’t spare a moment for the Ganges activists begging for their help. At the time, a young swami named Nigamanand was starving himself to death in the northern city of Haridwar to stop illegal quarrying of the Ganges riverbed. Nigamanand died on June 13, unnoticed and unheralded.

Now, the anticorruption law is in tatters after the upper house of Parliament declined to pass it. And with the media looking elsewhere, Team Anna has taken up the Ganges cause.

“I will support him” Hazare told the Press Trust of India on Monday, after a two-hour hospital visit with Agrawal in New Delhi. “He is fighting for the holy river.” By then, the 80-year-old Agrawal had already suffered a heart attack and endured a botched attempt at force-feeding while in state custody.

Ganges activism would seem to be a good fit for Hazare’s anticorruption agenda: construction mafias and their allies in government pillage the riverbank daily for sand and stones. The sacred waters are polluted by factories whose managers pay bribes for the privilege. The raising of expensive dams brings a fortune in kickbacks to politicians and regulators.

But last May, as Nigamanand was dying for these very issues, Team Anna looked the other way. When Vijay Verma, a lay member of the ashram to which Nigamanand belonged, asked Hazare’s top organizer for assistance, he got the brush-off. “He was very strange to me,” Verma told me last year, recalling a conversation with Arvind Kejrival, who one magazine has dubbed “Anna’s General.” “He said, ‘I have my own struggle. We are busy in our own struggle.’ As if this saint’s life weren’t in the balance.”

On Monday morning, however, as news of Agrawal’s fast began to spread on the Internet, Kejriwal started drumming up support on Twitter, that crucible of armchair revolutionaries.

Whatever you may think of the efficacy of political fasts — Agrawal’s demand for a complete moratorium on Ganges River dams seems unlikely — the threat of death has a way of separating the saints from the softies.

Hazare, who is 74, would seem to be among the latter. His movement began with that four-day fast last April. In August, with hundreds of thousands of supporters jamming the streets of New Delhi, he went 12 days without food, relenting only when Parliament reluctantly agreed to take up his anticorruption bill. It was Team Anna’s high-water mark.

By December, however, Hazare had to cancel a new fast after only one day amid low public interest. He now plans to hold a one-day fast on March 25 to draw attention to the cause of murdered whistleblowers. Similarly, in June, the popular yoga guru Baba Ramdev, ally of Hazare, fasted “unto death” for a mere nine days.

Compare these relatively brief efforts with the iron commitments of three men fighting for a clean and free-flowing Ganges: the late Nigamanand (68 days); Nigamanand’s teacher, Swami Shivanand (21 days, in 2000); and Agarwal (who hasn’t eaten since Feb. 8 or taken water since March 8). Agrawal is receiving intravenous fluids against his will.

It might seem that Anna Hazare has lent his star power to Agrawal and the Ganges cause. In fact, it’s the other way around.

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This presentation was based on a data from an occurrence survey conduced by the United States Geological Survey in New Jersey. The USGS wanted to measure the trace contamination of drinking water and compare that data between the various districts of New Jersey. The team headed out to the water treatment facility and measured the water that’s going in and the “cleaned” water that is released by the facility. Both waters were tested positive for the presence of pharmaceutical products (1/3 of the contamination in waste water), metabolites, detergents, plasticizers, flame retardants, fragrances, cosmetics, solvents, other drugs (OTC etc.) and trace elements of pesticides.

These contaminants survived not only the basic sewage treatment process but it also survived the advanced treatment procedures as well. The implications of the presence of these chemicals in the drinking water is not known as there are no studies done on the long term effects of such chemicals or possible biomagnifications of these chemical compounds through the aquatic life – and eventually leading the contaminated food source to humans. Of course the short term effects are negligible and hardly any effects since these compounds are in such low quantity in the drinking water. After the water was treated the presences of these chemicals were hard to detect and some of them were shown to be “not there” but in reality, it may have been simply the fact that we do not have the capability to measure them.

The easiest way to deal with this problem is to raise public awareness to proper disposal of drugs, chemicals, and items that may contaminate water. It is in the general public interest to make sure that they do not dispose things into the drinking water system as it only ends up in their own bodies.

How mass media system must be arranged is suggested by the formulation of theories of the press or normative mass media analyses that chart out roles for the mass media to perform and that serve as yardsticks in evaluating mass media performance. Formulated by Denis McQuail, mass media theories project clear statements on values, conditions, and aspirations of developing countries and calls for normative orientations. Libertarian theory, authoritarian theory, developmental theory, and the democratic-participant theory have general applicability on matter with the third world communication.

These theoretical formulations demonstrate the importance of the public sphere to mass media in the name of national unity. We find the applicability of these normative mass media theories in different contexts from socio-political to socio-economic conditions. Critical normative mass media analyses emphasize freedom of the press and public interests. Likewise, these orientations suggest that mass media resources must be directed and be harnessed towards national development.

Mass media performances have produced numerous codes of journalistic practices and principles (Nordenstreng and Topuz: 1989) and have introduced gradual regulations and normative discourses internationally. Mass media frameworks were formulated from primitive ideologies that mass media mainly provide political information. With the changing time and technology, there too, is a corresponding rise in mass media in terms of internal diversity.

However, some aspects have not changed fundamentally. In the political front, there are existing conflict between the mass media and those who exercise economic or political acumen. There are variations in the quality of what the mass media do, and still, there are first, second, and third class mass media consumers, both nationally and internationally.

Telenovelas, for instance, are rising to atmospheric heights for viewers of the middle class and the second class brackets. Most households are attuned to episodes daily and never get tired of lengthy commercials and frustrating plots. Their empowerment, however, has not appealed to the higher crowd. Elites would go for more “Westernized” models, often departing from local drama. Nevertheless, despite differences in personal interests, mass media’s function as educator, mobilizer, and propagator of virtues are still apparent and are not disregarded.

The diversity of human interests and opinions provides effective theories for mass media to move beyond its stagnation. In many, if not most countries, mass media no longer compose single system, but constitute separate, overlapping, and theoretically inconsistent elements. The structure and operation of mass media is rooted in the core values of modern societies: freedom, equality, and order (McQuail: 1987).

We now wonder why televiewers get hooked on telenovelas, especially with GMA-7’s Betty La Fea whose popularity has reached 80 million viewers around the world. So successful that there are more than 30 000 links to various websites on Betty, the ugly and insecure office worker defying the odds. Shows like this received laudable claims all over the world because of its particular mass media conditions – one of it is freedom.

Freedom is a condition, rather than a criterion, of performance. It refers to the rights to free expression and to free formation of opinion. Because of freedom, television shows are largely dependent on confidence given by mass media consumers. It offers a wide range of voices, which at the same time, responds to a wide-ranging demand. Mass media independence is therefore associated with diversity, creativity, originality, reliability, and personal satisfaction. Mass media independence is also associated with openness to novel ideas and liberal understanding of controversial views. These benefits bring unique appeal to news, drama, comedy, and mystery that suit the everyday needs of various social organizations.

The second basic principle, equality, hinders special favors given to mass media gate keepers. Access to mass media is given on fair basis, and the absence of discrimination is practiced. In general, mass media consumers appear to understand the principle of objective performance that helps increase mass media credibility.

The third basic principle, order, projects a wider social harmony in governing mass media consumers. The collective and interdependence of community lives derive from communication processes that call for communicative expressions of identity and uniqueness (McQuail: 1987). The integration of order is magnified in social domains that apply to community and other established structures of relations and cultural domains that apply to customs, traditions, among others of the community.

In conclusion, the basic principles of freedom, equality, and order ignite public interests and drives mass media consumers to extremes, often seeking for opinion and information in a higher degree. Mass media in the public interest is reaching a higher level of constancy, and with its growing impact, it is not impossible that in time, millions of people will begin living their lives in the post-Betty era.