The following is the full text of the speech delivered by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, at the inauguration of the platinum jubilee celebrations of the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) in New Delhi on Thursday, 27 February 2014: *** By PRANAB MUKHERJEE “Seventy-five years ago, the world was a very different place. Our country…
Tag Archives: Paid News
Not just a newspaper, a no-paid-news newspaper!
It speaks for the level of distrust that the media has managed to earn for itself that the front page of the Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar carries an emblem in Hindi (right) alongside the masthead, in the space usually reserved for ear-panel advertisements, proclaiming “No Paid News”. Two years ago, the Bombay newspaper DNA, in…
If The Economist looks at Tamil Nadu, it’s news?
In a bleak advertising scenario, Indian magazines have been pushed into running cheap and ugly advertisements, advertorials, and other intrusions dressed up as thinly disguised “innovations”, like a bit of editorial here for an ad elsewhere, to keep the ship afloat. But The Economist, too? The latest issue of the “newspaper” (as the magazine calls…
Asianet journos, editors must declare assets
On the day the Indian Express in New Delhi has exposed how the “paid news” rot runs deep in BJP-ruled Chhattisgarh, Rajeev Chandrasekhar‘s Asianet News Network (ANN) has announced steps “to restore confidence in media” and urged all other media companies to follow suit: *** PRESS RELEASE: In the current backdrop of some cases and…
A paper without ‘paid news’ for north Indians
It is the season for southern English newspapers to head North. Deccan Herald is due to print out of Delhi from December. And nowThe Hindu, “the most readable daily in the world” which already prints out of the national capital, has added another printing centre in the North, with a potshot at those who “serve…
Should ‘media corruption’ come under Lokpal?
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…
‘Editors are lobbying on behalf of corporations’
Corruption in the media is as old as, well, Malabar Hill, except that stories of individual transgressions—journalists and editors seeking cars, houses, laptops etc—have now been supplanted by stories of institutional transgressions. Writing in the Financial Times, London, the historian Ramachandra Guha puts his finger on a newer and more insidious form of media corruption:…
‘Good morning! Your paper is free of paid news!’
In this era of mercenary managers and predatory proprietors, brave is the editor who can actually stick his neck out—at least in public—and vouch for the virginity of his product. But Aditya Sinha, the new editor-in-chief of the Bombay daily Daily News & Analysis (DNA), clearly doesn’t mind taking the risk. At least, if nothing…
Just in case you have a view on ‘Paid News’…
A DAVP advertisement which appears in several newspapers today eliciting evidence on “paid news”. Also read: The paid news of India: guess who monetised first? Free, frank, fearless. No, grubby, greedy, gutless Editors Guild on paid news, private treaties The decentralisation of ‘paid-for’ news begins
‘Quantitative growth vs qualitative improvement’
Editorial in Business Standard: “These exposes [of paid news, nexus between media professionals and corporate lobbyists, etc] are, however, only the tip of an iceberg of professional misconduct in the Indian media. “The unprecedented quantitative growth of media in the past decade has overtaken qualitative improvement. The enormous improvement in financial compensation has, paradoxically, blunted…
How much more interactive can it get?
The lineup of questions for readers to answer in the Open Space column of The Times of India.
Income, outgo, assets, liabilities, profit and loss
With journalistic integrity, both individual and institutional, increasingly under question with the spurt of paid news, private treaties, mediating, brokering and other wheeling and dealing, there have been growing calls for journalists to also declare their assets and liabilities, much like politicians, judges and bureaucrats. Ravi Belagere (in picture), the colourful and sometimes controversial editor…
Jessica Lal verdict proof that Indian media works
The Supreme Court of India has upheld the life sentence awarded by the Delhi high court to Manu Sharma, the son of Congress leader and former Union minister Vinod Sharma, for killing Jessica Lal, who had declined to serve him a drink after the bar had closed in Delhi, in 1999. Manu Sharma’s counsel, the…
It takes 3 Idiots to call the bluff of Pauper Tigers
The prostitution of Indian journalism by pimps, promoters and proprietors selling editorial space without letting the reader know what is independently verified news and what is a paid-for advertisement in the garb of news, has attained pandemic proportions. “Paid News”, as the trend has been sadly named, happens not just during election time, but in…
As the year ends, a veteran’s lament for media
B.G. Verghese in Deccan Herald: “As the year closes, one must with sadness and shame pen a lament for the Indian media…. We must lament a disgraceful fall in standards as revealed by well documented stories of the sale of electoral coverage by sections of the news media through ‘packages’ relating to the kind of…
IJR 