Directed by the maverick Ram Gopal Varma, Rann is reportedly an insider’s account of how TRP-thirsty news channels manipulate and sensationalise stories.
“I am going to expose the media in this film and that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Varma says. “A lot of times democracy is controlled by forces that are not always visible to us.”
Bachchan plays a media Vijay Harsh Vardhan who is forced to compromise on his principles for the sake of ratings. Rann hits the screens later this month.
Cricket reporters are full of advice in their reports on what went wrong and what should have been done. But how good are they facing what they dish out?
In this 2007 video, New Zealand journalist Andrew Keoghan took guard against the world’s fastest indoor cricket bowler and survived—just about—to tell the tale.
Al Jazeera’s media show The Listening Post on how 24×7 media is dangerously inflaming passions against US President Barack Obama with lies, untruths, rhetoric—a little like the way a newspaper advertisement greeted John F. Kennedy the day he arrived in Dallas in 1963.
Scott Rosenberg, author of say everything, says the qeust for the first blogger is, in the end, an infinite recursion; each candidate a pointer to one before. And the search is as futile as searching for the first poet, first playwright, first novelist, or even the first human being.
“Blogging evolved, just like human beings have evolved. And the question is not who was the first blogger, but how did we get here.”
“In Europe, Japan and other countries, for many—most—of their newspapers, the primary source of funding is circulation, advertising second. In our country [the United States] advertising is the primary source of funding, circulation second.
“Any time you say the people who read your paper are secondary to the business community, you have lost and eventually you are not going to survive. In Europe, they know that in order to keep circulation up, they have to put out a damn good newspaper, something that people read, and they better not cut too many reporters because people are not going to read.”
It takes some chutzpah for a bank to utter the word “integrity” in the august company of AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) does so, but surprisingly uses the stout shoulders of the paparazzi to tell the world that it has it.
Meryl Streep essayed her role in the Oscar-nominated film The Devil Wears Prada.
In the documentary The September Issue, which releases in New York today, Anna Wintour plays Anna Wintour.
The legendary editor of the Baghwad Gita of the $300billion fashion industry, Vogue, takes off her trademark goggles and allows director R.J. Cutler to scrutinise the inner workings of the magazine for its September 2007 issue.
And revealing, in the process, an “Anna who is like Madonna“:
“…a woman who is opportunistically charming but who mostly seems to exist in splendid isolation, issuing sometimes-devastating pronouncements with a chilly insouciance that would make Marie Antoinette jealous.”
Wintour, daughter of the British journalist Charles Wintour, has an India connection going back 36 years. Her unauthorised biographer Jerry Oppenheimer writes that while growing up in London, Anna had a major passion for men—attractive, older achievers.
“She had many boyfriends. She was once literally chased around the house by Indian statesman V.K. Krishna Menon (in picture, left),” her father Charles says of his Cambridge classmate.
But Oppenheimer writes that papa Wintour “never stated whether he thought the fatal heart attack suffered at the age of 77 in 1974 (by the “red” Indian) was brought on by his supposed hot pursuit of his comely daughter”.
