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Times Now editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami has done the unthinkable.
After resisting the charms of social media for seven years, the social anthropologist from Oxford has joined his colleagues, competitors and compatriots in Twitterosophere, reports The UnReal Times.
Above is a screenshot of his first tweet; below is his second.
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Read the full story: Arnab Goswami on Twitter
Follow Arnab Goswami on Twitter: @arnabgoswami
Also read: What is sans serif?
He hasn’t quite spelt out which colleges we should go to, what subjects and courses we should take, in which language, or what pass-percentage is OK.
At least not yet.
But Press Council of India chairman Justice Markandey Katju‘s “order” on “some legal qualification” before one can enter the profession of journalism has been met with near-unanimous ridicule from mediapersons.
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In the Hindu, Outlook* chairman Vinod Mehta calls the move “absolute rubbish”:
“Some of the greatest journalists the world has produced have been without university degrees. I am a BA fail and was academically the most undistinguished student in school and college. And I haven’t done too badly.”
NDTV group editor Barkha Dutt, who has journalism degrees from Jamia Milia and Columbia school of journalism:
“The best training is on the field. While I can see the arguments about ‘declining standards and quality in journalists’, I do not believe the answer was in ‘more degrees’. (paraphrased)
Sashi Kumar of the Asian college of journalism:
“Most hard-nosed reporters who do unconventional beats, break scoops and exposes, are in the regional language press. And they are not necessarily MAs or PhDs. This is an ill-considered move and reflects Justice Katju’s ignorance about the field, and strikes at the root of freedom of expression.”
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In a letter to the editor of The Hindu, the veteran sports correspondent Partab Ramchand writes:
“It might be relevant to mention that I am a matriculate (second class) and I joined the profession virtually straight from school nearly 45 years ago without any training whatsoever in journalism and with just a knowledge of sports which I followed closely from my school days.
“I never saw the portals of a college and have never felt any regret in this regard.
“I have worked in various leading newspaper groups, heading the sports department on a couple of occasions, have gone on international assignments and am an author of 10 books on cricket. I fully endorse Barkha Dutt’s view that the best training is on the field which is exactly what I went through.”
* Disclosures apply
Infographic: courtesy The Times of India
Also read: ‘I have a poor opinion of most media people’
Editors’ Guild of India takes on Press Council chief
TV news channel editors too blast PCI chief
Has Justice Katju been appointed by Josef Stalin?
Priety Zinta‘s role in Lakshya is rumoured to have been based on NDTV anchor Barkha Dutt. Now, Bollywood actress Kareena Kapoor is tipped to play CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour in Prakash Jha‘s next film, Satyagraha.
Mail Today reports that Jha visualised Kareena’s role of a reporter who reports at the international level.
“The director was reportedly influenced by the huge fan following that Amanpour, famous for her reportage from war zones, enjoys…. Kareena has been closely observing Amanpour to play the character perfectly. Her look will be modelled on Amanpour’s daily style,” a source was quoted as saying.
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Visit Christiane Amanpour’s blog: Amanpour.
External reading: Tunku Varadarajan vs Amanpour
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Also read: Will underworld dons trust such a hot reporter?
Enter: the queen bee of Bollywood film journalists
Mouth ka saudagar to play Arnab and Rajdeep
For some journos, acting is second string in bow
Finally, Karnataka gets an ‘acting’ chief minister
It’s that time of year once again, when columnists crawl out of their quilts, double-dip their quills in vitriol and go for kill (yes, it’s a punny time of year, too).
The veteran journalist Jawid Laiq—with Indian Express, New Delhi, Economic & Political Weekly on his resume—does the needful in Mail Today, with a list of politicians and “other public nuisances” he would like to see less of in the year of the lord 2012.
In his firing line: two news television anchors—Barkha Dutt of NDTV 24×7 and Rajdeep Sardesai of CNN-IBN—and a newspaper editor, Chandan Mitra of The Pioneer.
Images: courtesy R. Prasad/ Mail Today
Also read: When Rajdeep Sardesai got it left, right and centre
After gripping the nation’s attention for nearly a year, the Niira Radia tapes that brought the politics-business-media nexus into sharp focus, is now on a slow but screechy rewind.
The lobbyist Radia has shut shop; arrested politicians (Kanimozhi) are on the way out of jail; the corporate bosses and business executives have secured bail; the government is busy reassessing the quantum of the scam (from Rs 173,000 crore to zero-loss to something more agreeable) and the case goes on.
Now, Vir Sanghvi, the former editor of the Hindustan Times, who “suspended” his weekly column in the Delhi paper and was redesignated “Advisor, HT Media” instead of “Advisory Editorial Director, HT Media”, after he was caught in conversations with Radia, claims he is on the way to resurrecting his “Counterpoint”.
In an interview with Revati Laul of Tehelka magazine (after a two-page column in Outlook* magazine and an appearance on NDTV to tout his innocence after forensic labs apparently certified that the tapes containing his voice were faked), Sanghvi claims he now stands vindicated:
Why did you feel the need to withdraw the column and from political journalism?
Because the allegation was that I was hand-in- glove with the Congress and that I was willing to offer Counterpoint to industrialists who wanted me to write things about them. These were damaging allegations. There are two ways to react to it. One is to say they are fake and I will ignore them. Or there’s my way. Which is to say they are fake and until I can prove they are fake, I will not do anything because I think it’s only reasonable that I go away and prove my innocence. I took the second approach.Are you going to revive the column?
Yeah. Once I finish shooting the two television shows I’m working on.
For the record, HT replaced Sanghvi’s column in the same slot with a column bylined Chanakya six months after he “suspended” his.
* Disclosures apply
Photograph: courtesy Hindu Business Line
Read the full interview: ‘I have been vindicated’
Also read: Scribe says tribe crossed line in Radia tapes
Vir Sanghvi & Barkha Dutt: “We were targetted”
Exclusive interview with Barkha Dutt on NDTV 24×7. Exclusive interview with Rajdeep Sardesai on CNN-IBN. Exclusive interview with Rahul Kanwal on Headlines Today.
“Live” exclusive interview with Arnab Goswami at “8.23 pm” on Times Now….
It was all in a day’s work for anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare on Tuesday, 13 September, as he rolled out the charpoy for Delhi TV wallahs in his “model” village, Ralegan Siddhi, and went on a PR overdrive.
Now, DNA reports that 74-year-old Hazare, who sat on a 12-day fast in Delhi last month, gave 17 interviews during the day and spoke for 11 hours.
“It was decided to give time slots to 17 TV channels yesterday. Though tired, Anna kept his word and obliged all channels talking continuously since early morning to night in a marathon interview session lasting about 11 hours,” said one of his close aides.
The interview sessions also witnessed “skirmishes” between TV crew as they could not agree to sequence and timing of the interaction, leading to heated exchanges when the embargo decided upon were jumped by some channels.
Read the full story: Anna Hazare gives 17 interviews over 11 hours
Also read: How The Times of India pumped up Team Anna
The ex-Zee News journalist behind Anna Hazare show
Ex-Star News, ToI journos behind ‘Arnab Spring’
The more-than-just-a-neutral-observer position taken by sections of the media on the Anna Hazare agitation has clearly begun to rile politicians, and at least two of them cutting across party lines have argued in the last couple of days that the media too must be brought under the purview of the proposed anti-corruption legislation.
Exhibit A: Union minister for law and social justice, Salman Khurshid.
According to a report in The Hindu, Khurshid asked Headlines Today executive editor Rahul Kanwal as to why media corruption should not be investigated under the Team Anna version of the Lokpal bill.
“Do I need to go back to the Niira Radia tapes? Now you are asking why the government has not investigated. If we go ahead with the investigation, we would be accused of being insensitive. If we do, there would be a mass moment for the media.”
Exhibit B: Samajwadi Party president Mulayam Singh Yadav.
Again, according to a report in The Hindu, Mulayam’s demand that the media also be brought under the Lokpal was met with thumping of desks by his colleagues.
“We [Samajwadi Party] suffered in the hands of media [during the polls],” he said during a debate on corruption. Even as a section of the treasury and opposition benche demanding that “media corruption” be also inquired into by Lokpal, Mulayam went on to state that it had become a practice for electronic channels to collect money during polls and air views in support of one party.
Also read: POLL: How has the media covered Anna movement?
Photograph: Television reporters deliver their piece to camera at the Ramlila grounds in New Delhi, against the backdrop of the stage on which Anna Hazare is fasting for the Lokpal bill
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from Delhi: The media coverage of the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement, like the movement itself, is a story in two parts—and both show the perils of the watchdog becoming the lapdog in diametrically opposite ways.
In Act I, Scene I enacted at Jantar Mantar in April, sections of the Delhi media unabashedly played along with the establishment in a “crude and disgusting character assassination”, discrediting civil society members in an attempt to strangulate the joint Lokpal drafting panel, without showing any remorse.
In Act II, three scenes of which have been enacted in the past week at Tihar Jail, Chhatrasaal Stadium and now the Ramlila Grounds, there has been no need to invoke Armani and Jimmy Choo, after the government’s spectacular cock-ups at the hands of high-IQ, Harvard-educated lawyers who recite nursery-school rhymes to wah-wahs from unquestioning interviews.
On the contrary, it can be argued that the pendulum has swung to the other end this time round.
The Times of India and Times Now, both market leaders in number terms, have made no attempt to hide where their sympathies lie in this “Arnab Spring”, when the urban, articulate, newspaper-reading, TV-watching, high-earning, high-spending, apolitical, ahistorical, post-liberalised, pissed-off-like-mad middle-class gets worked up.
When the market leaders go down that road, the others are left with no option but to follow suit.
Obviously neither extreme can be the media’s default position. However, unlike last time when there was little if not no criticism of the “orchestrated campaign of calumny, slander and insinuation“, at least two well known media figures have found the courage to question this kind of wide-eyed, gee-whiz reporting.
Sashi Kumar, the founder of India’s first regional satellite channel Asianet and the brain behind the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ), in Outlook*:
“In the race for eyeballs, a section of the media—some TV channels in particular—give the impression of sprinting ahead of the story and dragging it along behind them. What defies imagination, even as it stretches journalistic credibility, is that the messengers become the lead players, directing the route the story will take, conjuring up twists and turns where there are none, and keeping the illusion of news-in-the-making breathlessly alive….
“The relationship between such media and their essentially middle class consumers is becoming uncomfortably incestuous. When respondents cluster around a camera for a vox pop, they are not so much required to offer their independent view on an issue as add to the chorus of opinion orchestrated by the channel. A photo op masquerades as a movement. Dissident voices get short shrift. It is more like a recruitment drive than a professional journalistic exercise to seek and purvey news.
“Increasingly, the channel’s role seems to be to trigger and promote a form of direct democracy by the middle class. Politics and politicians are routinely debunked; even representative democracy doesn’t seem to make the grade.”
NDTV group editor and star anchor Barkha Dutt too strikes a similar note in the Hindustan Times:
“Critics of the Hazare campaign have questioned the media narrative as well, accusing wall-to-wall TV coverage of holding up a permanent oxygen mask to the protests. It’s even been pointed out that Noam Chomsky’s scathing commentary on the mass media -‘Manufacturing Consent’ would be re-written in TV studios today as Manufacturing Dissent.
“But again, if the TV coverage of the protests is overdone, it only proves that the UPA’s perennial disdain for the media — and the diffidence of its top leaders — has given its opponents the upper hand in the information battle. There is something so telling about the fact that 74-year-old Anna Hazare made effective use of the social media by releasing a YouTube message from inside jail and the PM of India’s oldest political party is still to give his first interview to an Indian journalist.”
*Disclosures apply
Photograph: Besides temporary studios set up by almost all the news channels, nearly a dozen Jimmy Jib cameras (swinging cameras on cranes) hover over the heads of those assembled at Anna Hazare‘s fast at the Ramlila grounds in New Delhi on Friday.
Also read: The ex-Zee News journo on Anna Hazare team
In August 2010, Femina featured NDTV‘s star-presenter and group editor Barkha Dutt on its cover in a smashing new avatar. That profile has made it to a bumper special issue featuring the 50 best faces that the women’s magazine has showcased over the past four decades.
In a piece accompanying Barkha’s story in the June 2011 issue, Dutt’s sister Bahar Dutt, a trained wildlife conservationist who works at CNN-IBN, pens a note from the heart to her more famous, more visible sibling.
