Media

There can be genuine problems with running an environmental campaign year after year. Since you can’t harp on the same tune all the time, there is a morbid tendency among campaigners to innovate. At times, certain innovative measures can even be bizarre, or just downright stupid. So it was with the largest British water company, Thames Water’s study that was launched during the World Water Week on August 25. The peg of the press release issued by the company was, “A third of UK women leave the...

When a leopard strayed into and then gracefully left Hema Malini’s bungalow in the Dindoshi area of northwest Mumbai a week or so back, it became an off-beat news item. Something that people ought to have found funny. What with the Dream Girl finding a new fan, and all that. The incident, however, was anything but off-beat. The news media, by and large, missed the point by miles. The point often lies in contextualising an incident, in this case it certainly had. The myopic failed to notice the...

Talking about the insufficient coverage of wildlife issues in the news media is akin to flogging a dead horse. Certainly in conservationist circles. Conservationists never mince words about what they think of the media per se. Having worked on both sides of this divide, with both wildlife organisations as well as in the news media, I feel conservationists too should start owning up to their faults. A journalist who reports or writes about wildlife faces a number of problems, apart from the well...

No journalist worth his or her salt can ever want to see a day without one's paper. But journalists in Manipur, time and again, are pushed so much against the wall, that they are left with no other choice. It's happened once again in the state — this time, it signalling a wrong start to the New Year. Newspapers failed to hit the stands on January 1, and as reports last came in, the stand of the beleaguered scribes has failed to make any impression on the callous rulers of the state. Journalists...

Twenty years after the fall of the Communist regime, politics in Hungary has come a full circle. It has virtually abolished freedom of the press and also assumed presidency of the European Union (EU). The new media law passed on December 21 by the Hungarian Civic Union (Fidesz), which enjoys a two-thirds majority in parliament, accords the government sweeping powers to monitor the press. Ironically, Hungary also marked its metamorphosis from being a mere satellite State of the erstwhile USSR...

The season of scandals is still on for the Indian news media. This time it is about the tall claims that Indian newspapers often make. The Consumer Complaints Council (CCC) of the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has upheld complaints against advertisements of three newspaper brands Prabhat Khabar, DNA and Nai Dunia. All advertisements concerned were released in September this year. The case against Prabhat Khabar was that it had staked claim to the number one position in Jharkhand...

The Indian Express, the daily we grew up to revere as the reporter's newspaper, doesn't seem to be so any more. The more you see its reportage on the Tatas, the more it seems to belong to the latter. We ought to have seen it coming when Shekhar Gupta recently walked less and talked more with Ratan Tata. The Tata group is in the thick of the 2G scam, but Gupta came across as one who had decided that they indeed were not and tagged along with Ratan Tata in the NDTV show, Walk the Talk. All through...

Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera is being used as a “bargaining tool” by Qatar to further its position internationally, US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks claim. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera has, however, described it as an American assessment only. In a cable sent on November 19, 2009, Ambassador Joseph E LeBaron wrote that the station could be used "as a bargaining tool to repair relationships with other countries, particularly those soured by al-Jazeera's broadcasts, including the United States"...

A journalist in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 50 lashes in public and two months in prison for reporting on a protest against power cuts. The sentence was handed down on October 26 to Fahd al-Jukhaidib, a correspondent for national daily Al-Jazira, by the General Court in Qubba in northern Saudi Arabia, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). Al-Jukhaidib's article, describing the problems faced by Qubba residents as a result of frequent power cuts, was published on September 7, 2008. The...

Yahoo is all set to jump on to the content bandwagon. The Internet giant on Tuesday launched the Yahoo Contributor Network, hosting 400,000 freelance writers, photographers and videographers from Associated Content, a firm that it bought over in May. Yahoo said in a statement that the Yahoo! Contributor Network would give freelance content creators access to popular destinations such as Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports and the Yahoo! homepage. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said in the...