Weekly Bangladesh Policy Outlook: Analysis, Truth, Debate.
Bangladeshi cinema and streaming have changed fast. Not long ago, a hero was expected to carry some moral weight. Today, leads light cigarettes in slow motion, drink, take drugs and drift through relationships, and the camera treats it all as style. Many also beat dozens of opponents and settle every dispute with fists or weapons….
Matiur Rahman’s article, “How much longer must we wait for press freedom?”, is an abridged version of a speech he gave at the Bay of Bengal Conversation 2026. The editor and publisher of Prothom Alo traces his demand for a free press from a student protest on February 1, 1962, to the present day. He…
Read More “A Credible Cry for Press Freedom, and the Questions It Leaves Open” »
Has the relentless stream of bulletins on Bangladesh’s news channels warped both the news and the way the public understands facts? To find out, the discussion sets today’s nonstop coverage against the fixed bulletins of the BTV era, assesses the damage caused by repetition and distortion, and examines how the Ministry of Information and the…
Bangladesh has seen a surge of young people chasing income through Facebook and YouTube monetization, drawn by viral success stories and the appeal of dollar earnings from a smartphone. The government has encouraged this trend, framing content creation as a path to youth employment and digital entrepreneurship, backed by training programs and public support. Beneath…
Crime reporting in Bangladesh occupies a peculiar and vulnerable position. It touches on police investigations, political interests, business rivalries, and personal reputations all at once, which makes it uniquely exposed to influence from parties who benefit from a particular version of events reaching the public. The result, increasingly visible in recent years, is a media…
A two-day photo exhibition titled Rising Hills, Beyond the Frame recently opened at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, displaying images of daily life, economic hardship, and resilience among indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Organised by the Manusher Jonno Foundation, it brought together participants from the United Nations Development Programme, UN Women, the European Union…
Read More “Framed Only at the Margins: Indigenous Culture and the Ethics of Bangladeshi Media” »
Bangladesh’s information space has undergone a marked transformation with the proliferation of self-styled news channels operating on YouTube, a great many of which function entirely outside any editorial standard, source verification process, or meaningful accountability structure. What was initially heralded as a democratization of media access, one that promised to lower barriers to entry and…
Read More “The Business of Deception: Unmoderated YouTube Channels and Bangladesh’s Trust Crisis” »
Ask a young graduate in Dhaka why they entered journalism, and the answer rarely mentions salary security or career prestige. It is almost always framed as calling, a desire to speak truth to power, to give voice to the voiceless. That framing captures something real about Bangladeshi journalism, but it also conceals an uncomfortable truth:…
Read More “Journalism in Bangladesh: A Chosen Smart Profession or a Path Driven Only by Passion?” »
How Private Television Became a Business First Enterprise Bangladesh’s private television sector, opened up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, now includes dozens of channels competing simultaneously for viewers, advertising revenue, and political relevance, as detailed in a recent analysis published by The Oniket Bulletin. That same analysis notes that most of these channels…
The Oniket Bulletin has, over the past sixteen weeks, assembled a substantial body of twenty-four articles under its Media, Publishing and Digital Dissemination category, offering what amounts to one of the more ambitious single outlet surveys of Bangladesh’s media policy landscape in recent memory. This report critically evaluates the commissioning choices, thematic coverage, factual depth,…
Read More “Review of 16 weeks Media and Digital Dissemination Articles in the Oniket Bulletin” »