Some call it an anesthetic, others call opium. Some call it an idiot box, some call it a friend. What is television really? And how does it effect your brain chemistry, attention span, and behaviour? The truth behind commercial television.
Monthly Archives: September 2007
Ojectivity: Now you see it, now you don’t
MUNCIE, Indiana: There is a school of thought that the relentless pursuit of a non-existent “objectivity” is what took the blood out of the American journalism marrow and rendered it lifeless to fight the greater battles facing the profession. And Marvin Kitman advocates in The Nation that the floundering evening news shows throw objectivity out…
The greatest advertisement of a great profession
In The Insider, Dustin Hoffman Al Pacino plays the role of Lowell Bergman, the CBS investigative journalist who does an expose of the tobacco industry. When a source scoffs at the parasitical role journalists play, Hoffman offers this succinct defence of journalism: “I was putting my life on the line when you were dicking around…
The first casualty of a scoop interview is grace—II
Nothing is what it seems in the big, bad, messy, and utterly incestuous world of Indian cricket (and Indian cricket reporting). Outgoing cricket captain Rahul Dravid gave an interview to Press Trust of India last week. Just another interview by an outgoing captain to India’s biggest news agency, you might think. Well, not quite. Lokendra…
‘SHOCKING ABUSE OF JUDICIAL POWER-II’
A group of social activists have issued the following statement criticising the Delhi High Court for sentencing four journalists of Mid-Day for contempt of court in a case involving the former Supreme Court Chief Justice, Y.K. Sabharwal. *** The decision of Delhi High Court to sentence Mid-Day journalists to four months of imprisonment for publishing…
India’s best editors? Just press ‘Click’
The provocation is not very clear. The classification is not very clear. And the parameters of selection are not very clear. But as part of its “Great Media Debate”, CNN-IBN is doing a “survey” of “India’s Top 25 Editors“, whom readers of its website ibnlive can rate by clicking on a button. And the nominees…
Come on, describe this really big number
The grammar girl tests your word power once again.
If you want to blog but don’t know where to start
For journalists still unsure of how to set foot into the deep, wide, welcome but relatively unknown ocean called blogosphere, Adam Tinworth lists the three kinds of openings they could sneak into: # Expert comment # Aggregation # Background Read the full article: Three types of journalist blogs
When a politician bites man, it is news
SWATHI SHIVANAND in The Hindu: “Most event organisers do not understand what interests journalists. So you have random speakers, deemed “unimportant” in journalist lingo, talking hours together while the impatient journalists wait for that the one key speaker who will give them the day’s news. Anyway, the point is not many outside the field understand…
Only for TV journalists and journalism students
A Swedish television anchor does the unthinkable but not the unimaginable, live and in full colour, and then returns to tell the tale.
‘SHOCKING ABUSE OF JUDICIAL POWER’
Four journalists of the Delhi newspaper Mid-Day have been ordered to be jailed for “contempt of court” following the publication of a cartoon and stories questioning the actions and motivations of former Supreme Court chief justice, Y.K. Sabharwal during the sealing exercise in the national capital. The editorial below appears in today’s edition of The…
Believe it or not: The strange power of reality TV
Official India loves to call the seven northeastern States the Seven Sisters. In reality, it’s more like Seven Step-Sisters. Closer to Bangkok than Delhi as the crow flies, stricken by separatist violence, and waiting for the rest of the country to wake up because of a silly time zone which keeps them behind metaphorically and…
Sauce for Al Qaeda ain’t sauce for the President?
Swear words on the front pages are not uncommon, especially in the United States, but they are not usual. “BASTARDS,” screamed one American newspaper the day after 9/11. In a word the header captured the general response of incensed readers to the act that brought down the World Trade Center towers. Now, the Rocky Mountain…
If your signal is weak, call the chief secretary
At the beginning of India’s liberalisation, the question a great many economists and columnists (like Tavleen Singh) asked was: should the State be running bakeries instead of looking at the big things in life? The allusion was to Modern Foods, a state-owned company that made bread. Eventually, the company was sold to Hindustan Lever. A…
‘How to get from B to A: Great minds like a think’
CHICAGO: The rise and rise of The Economist in the United States is something media analysts can’t stop speaking about. But the unapologetically elitist tone of its advertising is also a fine lesson in wordplay and branding. This one, on top of a cab near Union Station in Chicago, is a good example of both.…
MUST-WATCH: Getting a press pass is very easy
There are others, of course, but journalists should surely rank very high on the totempole of the most grumbling professionals. Grumbling about our bosses, grumbling about our pay, grumbling about the way our organisations are run, we quickly lose sight of what we are here for, and quietly of all our energy. How can we…
In the end, a long life becomes a one-liner
Obituary writing, like large swathes of newspaper writing, is a poorly developed and unevolving art in India. Except for the likes of Haresh Pandya from Rajkot, Gujarat, who files long, detailed obituaries for The Guardian, London, and The New York Times, our obituaries are ridiculously skimpy, colourless and plainly insulting to lives that are no…
Why isn’t your byline up in neon lights?
On Broadwick Street in London, there is a pub called John Snow, named after the doctor who identified the water pump nearby as the source of an outbreak of cholera. In Plymouth, there is a pub named after Major-General Sir Jeremy Moore, who passed away recently. Yes, there is an “Orwell‘s” in Glasgow, and there…
So you think there’s only one kind of magazine?
Welcome to GOOD, the YouTube magazine for people who want to do well by doing good.
Forget tomorrow’s, give us yesterday’s news
The dirty old man of Indian journalism, Khushwant Singh, has a good question in his latest column in the Hindustan Times. Where, he asks, is yesterday’s news? In other words, whatever happens to the stories that the media pursues like a pack of hounds for a while, and then—suddenly, mysteriously, inexplicably, uniformally—falls silent? “There are…
IJR 