Media

No matter how hard you try not to fume at antics of Indian television reporters, you will invariably fail. They are, bar the sane exceptions that are becoming fewer by the day, decidedly callous, unabashed, unrepentant, and ignorant. They don’t learn, they don’t do an ethical job of it, and they strut around arrogantly giving you the impression that they are answerable to none. Actually, they are not. Except to their respective managements whose raison d'être is to make money, and it does not...

The media has gone to town with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor, Raghuram Rajan's mention of Adolf Hitler and "strong" governments in his speech on 'Democracy, Inclusion, and Prosperity' at the DD Kosambi Ideas Festival held on February 20 in Goa. What many have been gloating about is that the RBI governor was essentially taking potshots at the Prime Minister with the insinuations. The two paragraphs that have been circulating on social media would certainly seem so, especially if one...

In 2006, the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) published a damning report on the presence of banned pesticides in colas. The Indian media, by and large, went easy on the two cola brands – Pepsi and Coca-Cola. The allegation was serious and the implications far and wide. Yet, the cola companies, the opulent advertisers that they are, tided over the crisis with consummate ease. One of the many reasons for this was that news media establishments steadfastly refused to push...

Memories of last year’s Uttarakhand catastrophe are a tad difficult to push under the rubble of amnesia. For the last few days, incessant rains have been wreaking havoc in districts like Champawat, Chamoli and Nainital. Landslides too have been reported from many places. A bridge that had been constructed after the 2013 Uttarakhand disaster has been washed away. It is not without reason that memories of the other day keep rushing back. The superficial reportage of the ongoing rains is there...

There are many reasons why journalists are such a scantly-respected lot today, compared to even what we were when I joined the profession 23 winters back. One being that journalism, increasingly so, has ceased to be about people. The decline, steeply – if I may insist, started in the 1990s when most journalists lost the plot, when the ‘demos’ part of the democracy began disappearing from news pegs. What has been lost in the bargain has been vibrancy, truth. Spins imparted by journalists, apart...

Tuesday last brought this rather alarming and disconcerting bit of news that global warming is threatening more deadly Everest-kind of avalanches. The scare was attributed to the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). But as it turns out, it was sheer scare-mongering, and quite baseless and impetuous at that. The ICIMOD report, Glacier Status in Nepal and Decadal Change from 1980 to 2010 Based on Landsat Data, had in fact made no such assertion or...

One forms a perspective based on two things: what one gets to see, and one’s own sense of reasonability, sensibility and logic. Quite often, in the case of many, it is the lack of both. The ideas and opinions I hold of Kashmir today are based on what I have seen, mostly from afar, and the sense that I have tried to make of it. Most of these have been from the point of view of a journalist of the old school which believes that journalism is about people. When I started out as a journalist a...

The beleaguered United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has decided to give a Diwali gift to Indian journalists. The Union Cabinet on Tuesday approved the final Majithia Wage Board recommendations, which will benefit more than 45,000 journalists and non-journalists in the country. The revised wages, with hikes ranging from 10 per cent to 30 per cent, will come into force with retrospective effect from July 2010. Allowances, such as transport, house rent and hardship shall be effective from...

A year after the Press Council of India decided to bury a sub-committee report on the malaise of “paid news” in the news media, the issue has returned to haunt the council again. The Central Information Commission (CIC) has directed the Press Council make public the report of the two-member sub-committee as part of suo motu disclosure mandated under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. The Press Council of India had constituted a two member sub-committee comprising senior journalists Paranjoy...

In July this year, the Editor of Mint, R Sukumar, created a bit of a flutter when he wrote of an anchor with a business news channel who got three times her earlier salary, for agreeing to leave the top two buttons of her shirt unbuttoned, after switching jobs. Sukumar admitted that the column was all about losing friends and offending people, and maintained a diplomatic tone throughout. But did he have a point? Maybe. But a study conducted by two Indiana University researchers recently found...