Sucheta Dalal in public row on private treaties

The true depth of an employer-employee relationship is never quite revealed during the course of the latter’s employment, generally speaking. It is only after the two have parted ways, when the two parties take their gloves off and shadow-box each other, does it become clear whether it was good cohabitation or a charade.

India’s bestknown business investigative journalist, Sucheta Dalal, left India’s largest English daily, The Times of India, several years ago, after a nine-year stint during which she also played a stellar role in unravelling the securities scam involving the now deceased Harshad Mehta.

Since her departure from the paper, Dalal has moved to other things, writing columns and books, setting up a magazine. In recent times, she has played an important role in exposing the “private treaties” of her former employer that has eaten into the vitals of media ethics in boom-time.

Now, ToI has hit back, below the belt.

In an interview with Nikhil Pahwa’s newly launched medianama, S. Sivakumar, the CEO-designate of ToI’s private treaties division, is asked about a November 2007 letter from Economic Times editor Rahul Joshi that Dalal quoted in an article, that firmly established how the private treaties were casting a dark shadow over the group’s editorial sanctity.

Sivakumar’s response:

“Because you have an agenda. You know Sucheta was working with us… I don’t know whether you know it or not, but she was working with us and I didn’t want to talk abot the Harshad Mehta scam, since you are recording, I didn’t want to go on abot that. There’s a lot of background, and under what circumstances she left the organisation.” (emphasis added)

The defamatory insinuation has justly got Dalal (who was given the Femina Woman of Substance award for the expose) fuming.

In response, she writes back:

“I have a letter from the company to say “we treasure” your association with us when I left the Times of India. Do they hand out such letters to all and sundry? It may also interest people to know that Ashok Jain, the late Chairman of the Times Group, had asked me to draft a Code of Ethics for journalists—maybe that too was part of their poor judgement.”

Warned of “recourse”, Sivakumar has sent a clarification:

“As a policy we never comment on any of our employees either currently  working with us or had worked with us in the past…. We as an organisation respect all journalists.”

Sivakumar’s offensive comments have been struck through, and comments disallowed for the piece.

Read the full exchange: ‘There are two currencies for advertising: cash and treaties’

Also read: Forget the news, you can’t trust the ads either

‘The first casualty of a cosy deal is credibility’

‘Indian media in deeply murky ethical territory’

‘Indian print media outshining other media’

All the news from the western front may be dark and depressing. Plunging readerships, falling circulations, falling advertising revenues, cost-cutting, job losses, the works.

It’s the exact opposite scenario in India, at least among the big, listed media companies, reports Sruthijith K.K. in the Mint.

Media and entertainment companies in India are twice as profitable as their global peers. Between 2003-07, print media in India enjoyed a compounded 61 per cent growth in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amoritisation (EBITDA), far more than other media forms.

An analysis of 37 listed companies showed that gross profits from Indian media and entertainment companies was 11 per cent higher than the benchmark index on the nation’s two biggest stock exchanges.

# TV 18 posted the highest compounded growth in Ebidta of 183.26% between 2003-07.

# TV Today Network Ltd, broadcaster of channels such as Aaj Tak and Headlines Today, was the poorest performer, with a corresponding figure of 4.89%.

# In 2007, Sun TV Network Ltd, the Madras-based conglomerate with a strong southern footprint, led with an Ebidta margin of 65%.

Read the full article: Media firms outperform global peers

‘Indian MSM preoccupied with urban issues’

“Today’s media, especially the mainstream media, are preoccupied with urban issues and the lifestyles of the rich and the affluent. This urban bias manifests itself in varied ways, whether it is in the print or in the electronic media, depending on their owners and managers.

“For such a market-driven media, the problems of the common man or of the rural poor are not matters of serious concern. It is said that the marketing managers, and not the Editors, decide the policy of many newspapers today. This is a matter of concern.”

-Somnath Chatterjee, speaker of the lower house of India’s parliament, at a speech in Hyderabad on 11 May 2008

Read the extended text: For a new deal to the rural poor

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

That’s French for the more things change the more they remain. We think we are going through an amazing boom, but Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was saying the same in 1957. We think it is only now that the need to attract younger readers has become imperative, but the Daily Mirror was issuing television commercials aimed at the young in the 1960s.

Ditto, the competition between newspapers and television, as this news item reproduced from The Hindu of May 6 demonstrates, May 6 of 1958 that is:

“A struggle between newspapers and television was forecast by the editor of The Times, Sir William Haley, in London on May 1. He said some newspapers pretend they will not be affected by it. To meet the challenge of television, newspapers would have to “rethink our production, advertising, finances, staff policy and regain our purpose, fighting for anything we believe in, namely the written word.” Newspapers would have to become accurate when competing with television. Sir William said. “You will no longer be able to have 16 different descriptions in the Press of what somebody wore because the whole country will have seen it.”

All the memories, memorials, memorabilia

Newseum, the revamped 250,000-square foot light-filled monument to five centuries of journalistic self-glorification, opens in Washington DC this Friday, and Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post bungs in the glory of the story above the fold, calling it “dazzling, innovative and absorbing” but overpriced.

Three times the size of the earlier Newseum, the museum’s six floors packs papers, photos, videos, films, tablets, artefacts, exhibits, of the (chiefly American) heroes, villains and oddballs who made the news business.

Photograph: Sam Kittner/ Newseum

Read The Washington Post story

Can not reviewing a book become anti-national?

The Indian English media’s relationship with the literary world is, at best, a tempestuous one. The country’s biggest newspaper, The Times of India, does not, as a matter of policy, carry reviews of books by Indians although Salman Rushdie’s latest squeeze or V.S. Naipual’s visits to prostitutes will get acres of coverage.

The English magazines at least have designated books’ editors but the range of books reviewed is limited. On television, the country’s most respected English language network, NDTV, has a dedicated weekly programme called Just Books (Saturdays, 12.30 pm) hosted by Sunil Sethi, formerly of India Today and Sunday Mail.

On top of that, there are all the usual questions: Do enough readers read books to merit dedicated coverage? Do book review-reading readers buy books? Should the media be bothered about who buys the books? Should books in the Indian languages get coverage in the English media? Who decides what books to review, what author to feature? Can an author demand coverage as a matter of right? Etcetera.

Enter, Amaresh Misra (in picture), film critic turned columnist turned war analyst.

Author of Mangal Pandey: The true story of an Indian revolutionary (Rupa) and the biography Lucknow: Fire of grace (HarperCollins), the Allahabad-born Misra wrote his magnum opus War of Civilizations: India, South Asia, Europe and the World, to mark the sesquicentenary year of the Indian war of independence last year.

But, Misra claims that NDTV’s Sethi refused to feature the book or the author on his programme. Worse, Misra alleges that Sethi made “racist remarks” over the phone. That exchange has led to a fullblown war of words between the author and the channel.

Misra has dashed off an angry, invective-laden letter to the channel’s compliance officer, Rajiv Mathur, alleging, among other things, an “anti-India attitude” and a bias against “secular authors from the Hindi-Urdu belt”.

Dear Mr Rajiv Mathur,

At the outset let me explain some things to you. I have not written War of Civilisations “allegedly”; it has been published by Rupa in January 2008. It has been reviewed in The Hindu, The Indian Express, Financial Express, Hindustan Times, and other Hindi, Urdu, Marathi and Gujarati journals and magazines.

It seems you are too ignorant a person, you do not read newspapers, and you do not care to check facts. You look down upon Hindi, the regional language and the Urdu press. Obviously, Sunil Sethi has fooled you.

You lie when you say “we neither appreciate nor entertain any requests, influence” in Just Books or any other program. You do not give enough space to secular views especially if they come from the Hindi-Urdu belt. In 2004, your channel too succumbed to portraying that BJP is going to win. All you English speaking ignorant people got that one wrong.

You have a prejudice against the Hindi-Urdu belt and Muslims; because that is the land and those are the people who gave India freedom, something which you anti-national people do not like; the Hindi belt also, does not speak in your wimpish language.

I am writing a letter to all leading secular politicians from Lalu Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan, Sonia Gandhi, to V.P. Singh, and Sitaram Yechury, and all other intellectuals who respect me as a writer.

This is now war.

I was in a mood to compromise but you guys are too smug. It would be interesting to see how even the BJP will react to the fact of Prannoy Roy’s British ancestry and how that has translated into an anti-India attitude in NDTV English.

I have no quarrel with NDTV Hindi.

The letter I am writing will explain how the only detailed book written by an Indian on the 150th anniversary of 1857 was ignored by NDTV. Sunil Sethi personally told me that he has time for Salman Rushdie and not for me. You first review William Dalrymple’s book (The Last Mughal) and then you ignore mine, which is a bigger work on 1857 and which has created waves in London as you can see from the Guardian article attached with this mail.

Tell me if you were in my place, what would you have construed? Isn’t this racism? Dalrymple is white, so he is reviewed but not Amaresh Misra because he is dark?

Now you will say that you have reviewed other Indian writers. Let us make a list of those writers. And let us see who they are. They are people who are anti-small town India. Barring exceptions, they are people who cannot digest the fact that a dark skinned man like me someone who is rugged, capable of taking on all you guys single-handedly in intellect, use of English language and physical strength, who laughs at the pathetic pretensions of Delhi’s English pseudo-elite wimpish culture and their kowtowing to “C” grade foreigners roaming in Delhi—has written a book which can be compared to likes of Kay, Malleson and Eric Stokes. It would be too much, of course, to expect that you have even heard of these names.

As it is Sunil Sethi knows nothing and even your English speaking Delhi intelligentsia laughs at him. Charlie Chaplin would have made a film called The Small Book Buffoon on him. If you had ignored my any other book (which you have) I might not have complained. But this is a book on 1857—it is about Indian nationalism.

You cannot, I repeat, cannot ignore it, whatever happens.

A thousand NDTVs can be closed down, a thousand Prannoy Roys, Rajiv Mathurs and Sunil Sethis of the world can be grinded into dust on the issue of Indian nationalism. The British killed 10 million Indians; Bhagat Singh sacrificed his life; what are you in front of them—not even a speck in the dust.

The issue is too large. You guys take direct orders from foreign embassies and on the nuclear deal your views are pro-American. 1857 goes against pro-Americanism. That is why you do not want to publicise the book.

You guys are racists—you portray UP and Bihar as a land of darkness; you do not want to give a chance to a man from that region, even though he is far more accomplished than all of you put together. I will charge you formally with the criminal charge of racism and anti-national activities.

Let hell reign.

Amaresh Misra

Photograph: courtesy Kedar Nene/Fotocorp, The Hindu

Will you buy a second-hand stock from this man?

India’s Supreme Court has issued a notice to CNBC-TV18 financial analyst Mathew Easow, and asked him to disclose his contract with the TV channel after the stock market regular found him advising viewers to buy stocks which his associate companies were selling in the market. The court has also stayed an appellate tribunal’s order overturning the ban.

In April 2006, Easow—”a well-known chartered accountant with 18 years experience in the capital and financial markets”—had been directed by the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to “cease and desist” from recommending any investment in the public media, after finding him guilty of violating regulation 4(2)(f) of the SEBI (prohibition of fraudulent and unfair trade practices relating to securities market) regulation.

Easow successfully appealed against the SEBI order with the Securities Appellate Tribunal which imposed a penalty on the market regular. Challenging the SAT order, SEBI said the tribunal had failed to appreciate that Easow had recommended “a very impressive price appreciation in certain scrips” (between June and December 2005) within a short term, while he himself had sold those very shares on the same day.

Easow had sent six e-mails to TV 18 giving stock advice with buy and sell recommendations regarding four listed companies. The advice had also appeared on the channel’s website moneycontrol.com

While enquiring into the trading pattern of Easow, SEBI found that he had taken an opposite trading pattern to what had been recommended to the investors. “It is axiomatic that a person who recommends others to buy securities must himself be either passive or buy such securities rather than sell them,” the SEBI petition said. “The only circumstance when a person would sell securities after telling lay investors to buy would be a person who is taking advantage of his misleading information in the first place by giving stock tips, thereby inflating the price of the stock and then offloading such securities after the recommendation is aired,” it added.

Photograph: courtesy moneycontrol.com

Also read: Ethical journalism is a bad word at CNBC-TV18

Business journalism or business of journalism?

SUCHETA DALAL: Invest on his recommendations at your own risk

‘The TV satellite is mightier than the ICBM’

From The Economist obituary of Sir Arthur C. Clarke:

“In 1962, at the chilliest part of the cold war and just after the launch of Sputnik had heralded the space age, he discussed in ‘Profiles of the Future‘ the implications of transatlantic satellite radio and television broadcasts, with information raining down on previously isolated parts of the world.

“‘Men will become neighbours,’ he wrote. ‘Whether they like it or not…The TV satellite is mightier than the ICBM (inter-continental ballistic missile)‘.”

Tintin publisher Leblanc passes away

Sans Serif records with regret the demise of Raymond Leblanc, the Belgian publisher behind the comic-book hero Tintin. He was 92. The iconic boy-reporter, created by Herge, had first appeared as a character in 1929, but it wasn’t until the association with Leblanc began that he became a global hero. Tintin first appeared in a  fortnightly magazine in 1946, and later became a stand-alone star of the Lombard publishing house.
Also read: All fun and no work makes Tintin a good boy

If Steven Spielberg has a problem in casting Tintin…

Billions of blue blistering barnacles!!!

Khushwant Singh on his last day at the Weekly

The dirty old man of Indian journalism, Khushwant Singh, has used the occasion provided by M.J. Akbar’s unceremonious exit from The Asian Age to describe his own departure from The Illustrated Weekly of India in the latest issue of Outlook:

“The journal, like all others published by Bennett Coleman, including The Times of India, had been restored by the government to the Jain family. As soon as they took over, they started meddling in my business. My contract was terminated and my successor appointed. I had one week to go. I wrote a tearful piece of farewell, wishing the Illustrated Weekly future prosperity. It was never published. When I arrived at the office in the morning to tidy up my desk, I was handed a letter asking me to quit immediately. I picked up my umbrella and walked back home.

“It was an undeserved, deliberate insult. It still rankles in my mind. The Jain vendetta continues to this day. Even functions held in my honour presided over by people like Amitabh Bachchan, Maharani Gayatri Devi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while reported in the Times of India, never carry my name or photograph. That is how small-minded people with pots of money and power can be.”

Read the full article: F*** all editors