The debasement of the editorial and op-ed page of newspapers, by turning them into the plaything of maaliks and marketing mavens, is a work in rapid progress. Hindustan Times and The Indian Express run signed advertisements by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath—an extension of the jacket ad flanking their front pages, to mark his…
Category Archives: Issues and Ideas
Page 1 to Page 12: What newspaper coverage of the death by suicide of a sitting BJP MP reveals
As the old saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, thrice is enemy action. Or, as we say in journalism, a trend. In the space of just 20 days, two Members of Parliament have been found dead. The first, 7-time MP Mohan Delkar, was found hanging in his hotel room in Bombay in February.…
How the Marathi daily ‘Prahaar’, owned by M/s Narayan Rane & Sons, proves a ‘New Yorker’ writer right, every single morning
The legendary New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling is credited with the aphorism that “the freedom of the press belongs to those who own one”. Meaning: he who pays the printer calls the shots. The Marathi newspaper Prahaar underlines the truth of that observation like no other. *** The 8-page Prahaar, published from Mumbai, Thane and…
“Perverted, grotesque”: An illustration in a TOI edit page piece that got the Russian ambassador’s humourless goat
An edit page piece in The Times of India by the paper’s edit page editor Swagato Ganguly has got the Russians—or at least their representative in India—all riled up. The piece, “Does soft power matter?“, built on the YouTube video released by Vladimir Putin‘s bugbear Alexei Navalny, has led to a loud protest by Russia’s…
Chandan Mitra became owner of ‘The Pioneer’ without spending a rupee. The group is now in financial trouble.
In its hey day, The Pioneer counted Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill and Harivanshrai Bachchan among its star correspondents. But 155 years after it rolled off the press in Lucknow, the newspaper has run into serious financial trouble, with insolvency proceedings being launched against its publishing company CMYK Printech. *** Purchased by the Thapar Group in…
Barring ‘Indian Express’ and ‘Telegraph’, few newspapers ask why an orderly farmers’ protest suddenly went awry
The farmers’ protests in Delhi against new farm laws sneaked in through Parliament, with former ‘Prabhat Khabar‘ editor Harivansh playing a questionable part as Rajya Sabha deputy chair, had been mostly peaceful and exemplary for 66 days. But the “tractor parade” by the farmers on Republic Day, with protesters breaching pre-agreed conditions and “storming” Red…
“De-marketing”: An almost 100% increase in cover price of ‘Mint’ in Bangalore
A ridiculously low cover price was one of key reasons for Indian newspapers to feel the COVID pinch more than their western counterparts. With advertising dead during the lockdown, circulation revenue too dried up, as the perils of chasing the lowest common denominator became clear. Even after the lockdown was lifted, major newspaper groups, sitting…
#SuperhitGhotala: Arnab Goswami’s 80 MB of WhatsApp chats in 12 tweets, 7 screenshots and 2 YouTube videos
“He who lives by other people’s WhatsApp chats shall be judged by his own WhatsApp chats.”—old jungle saying *** For weeks, after the death of Sushant Singh Rajput, India’s TV news channels feasted on crumbs fed to them—leaked transcripts of WhatsApp conversations of stars and upstarts, hinting darkly at murder, extortion, drugs and sex, all in the run-up to the assembly elections due in…
Vague, arbitrary, unconstitutional, outdated: 9 reasons why journalists should want Section 2(c)(i) of the Contempt of Courts Act to go
The constitutional validity of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, has been challenged in the Karnataka High Court by Krishna Prasad, former Editor-in-Chief of Outlook; N. Ram, former Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu and director of The Hindu Publishing Group; Arun Shourie, former Editor of The Indian Express and former Union minister; and Prashant Bhushan, senior…
What’s public about a private treaty? Times Group has Rs 69 crore stake in gaming platform MPL, the Indian cricket team’s kit sponsor
Conflict of interest is the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. The official kit sponsor of the Indian cricket team is MPL: Mobile Premier League, ostensibly a fantasy game. And MPL’s unashamed brand ambassador is the team’s captain Virat Kohli. The Indian Express reveals today that Kohli has been allotted debentures worth Rs 33.32 lakh…
A masterclass from a 94-year-old columnist to a “frustrated” BJP factotum masquerading as Governor and insulting India’s democracy on a daily basis
T.J.S. George, the co-founder of Asiaweek magazine, who does a weekly column for The New Indian Express, wrote a piece last week on Kerala governor Arif Mohammed Khan‘s decision to disallow a session of the Kerala legislative assembly to discuss the Centre’s contentious new farm laws. The intro to the column read: “Arif Mohammed Khan…
In Kerala, the state with 100% literacy, a course in schools and colleges to promote digital literacy
Three years ago, government schools in Kerala made headlines for introducing a course on dealing with fake news. Now the state has announced a five-step digital media literacy programme titled Satyameva Jayate. The salient points: What is wrong information? Why does it spread fast? What precautions should be adopted by social media users? How do…
If newspapers had been as clear about farm laws as they are against taxing corporates, Punjab’s farmers could have gone back home a long time ago
The month-long agitation by Punjab’s resolute farmers over the agricultural “reforms”, artfully sneaked through Parliament with former journalist Harivansh (former Editor of Prabhat Khabar) presiding over the Rajya Sabha, has seen the usual divisions in the media. Large sections of the media have been susceptible to official spin, running audio and video transcripts provided by…
“In journalism, we can be in the heating business, or we can be in the lighting business”: Nicholas Kristof
“In journalism, we can be in the heating business or the lighting business”: @nytimes columnist Nicholas Kristof, who called out card companies for facilitating child porn, enunicates the profession’s core principle on @karaswisher’s superb podcast, Sway: https://t.co/unM8cvxE7S pic.twitter.com/UdsS3NscyG — churumuri (@churumuri) December 25, 2020 Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times opinion columnist who played a…
TV coverage of farmers’ protests in Delhi shows that “farmers claim an integrity in the Indian subconscious that the media lack”
The academic and public intellectual Shiv Visvanathan, has a piece in The Telegraph on the ongoing farmers’ protests in Delhi, demanding the repeal of new laws passed by the BJP-led government: “Yet more than the State with its idiotic ideas of governance, it is television media that is uncomfortable with the farmers’ strike, seeking to…
J-POD || Podcast || “Pakistan took foreign journalists to Balakot a month after India’s strike. India is still to take its own journalists to Galwan six months after the Chinese incursion” || Sushant Singh
Exactly six months ago, on the intervening night of June 15-16 this year, the lives of 20 Indian soldiers ended—literally at the hands of the Chinese in the heights of Ladakh. For several weeks, large sections of mainstream media were in denial, dishing out the sarkari view that there was nothing abnormal on the border.…
India’s newspaper owners demand ‘Maximum Support Price’—200% more government spend on print media, and 50% hike in rates for sarkari ads
Nine months after the pandemic broke the back of the media, the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) has revived its demand for a “stimulus package”. It includes: # Removal of 5% customs duty on newsprint # A two-year tax holiday # 200% increase in government spend on print media # 50% increase in rates of government…
Sending rejoinders and clarifications to media outlets is old hat. Booking cases against journalists is the norm in #NewIndia.
The front page of the Gujarati language newspaper Divya Bhaskar, published by the Dainik Bhaskar group, after four of its journalists were booked by police in Rajkot for a sting operation at a police station. The journalists were accused of trying to defame the police and compromising the investigation. The paper, however, contended it was…
In the Samir Jain era, the ‘Times Group’ has shut down 26 newspapers and magazines. ‘Mumbai Mirror’ was a death foretold.
The pandemic and the economic slump may have given the Times group the cloud cover to pull the trigger on Mumbai Mirror, but the tabloid’s fate was probably decided when it was hived off from The Times of India’s parent company a couple of years ago seven months ago. Launched in 2005 with a Bennett…
“This is not the time to put newspaper employees on the street. Times Group must show its leadership by doing business with a human face”: Mumbai Press Club on ‘Mirror’ move
The Brihanmumbai Union of Journalists (BUJ) and the Mumbai Press Club have both spoken out against the abrupt decision to turn Mumbai Mirror into a weekly, and shut down Pune Mirror. *** *** Following is the full text of the statement issued by Mumbai Press Club: “The Mumbai Press Club, representing over 2,000 journalists of…
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