Channels calling for war. Studios populated with former generals talking military tactics. Social media messaging apps flooded with fake news and propaganda. Al Jazeera‘s excellent media programme ‘The Listening Post‘, hosted by Richard Gizbert, takes a look at the war-mongering, hate-spewing, “unjournalistic ranting” of primetime TV in India. *** Rohit Chopra, an associate professor at…
Monthly Archives: February 2019
Kashmir’s small English dailies show more balance and sobriety than mainland India’s gung-ho newspapers in putting out the casualty figure in the air strikes on Pakistan
Verification is a vital function of the news media, especially when the reader-viewer-surfer is exposed to relentless propaganda via electronic and social media. India’s air strike on Pakistan on February 26 posed a test of the newspapers and television against the backdrop of opposing claims made by the two countries. As if to prove the…
Pakistani editor Beena Sarwar does the most unfashionable thing in contemporary media: sticks her neck out and spews peace
While a vast majority of Indian and Pakistani journalists become megaphones for war-mongers and hate mongrels, the admirable Pakistani journalist and editor Beena Sarwar takes the high road. #JungSeJungHai #AmanSeAmanHai Also read: TV anchors wrap themselves in tricolour, hail air strikes
How TV anchors wrapped themselves in the tricolour and proudly cheered India’s latest aerial strike in Pakistan, unmindful of its consequences
An Indian response to the February 14 terror attack in Kashmir, the deadliest in 30 years of militancy, was a dead certainty—and one which many “commando comic channels” craved for. With a difficult general election looming, Narendra Modi did not disappoint. The surgical strikes on February 26 deep inside Pakistan territory have resulted in an…
The ‘Sunday’ magazine sub-editor who secretly cooked her way to become the best known Indian chef in the world, after Gaggan Anand (if you believe food critics, that is)
In the Hindustan Times magazine supplement, Brunch, the food writer Vir Sanghvi writes about Asma Khan, the former Sunday magazine journalist whose hashtag could well be #SubKaChaatSubKaVikas. (Sunday, launched by the Ananda Bazaar Patrika group, is now defunct. M.J. Akbar was its first editor.) Writes Sanghvi: “It is a funny feeling when a colleague from decades…
Did a newspaper interview bring to an end Indira Gandhi’s dark Emergency whose hallmark was, ironically, censorship of the media?
There is plenty of literature on why Indira Gandhi introduced Emergency on 25 June 1975: political unrest in Gujarat and Bihar; industrial strikes and labour protests; the Allahabad high court verdict disqualifying her for electoral malpractices; etcetera. Why did she dramatically call it off 21 months later, on 21 March 1977? A single sentence in…
Kashmir newspaper editors vow to fight “deliberate strangulation and subversion of media in the state” after Modi government freezes ads to two dailies
The first casualty of war is said to be truth, a statement attributed to various worthies. In Kashmir, the first casualty of the gathering clouds of war is newspaper freedom. As India and Pakistan begin shadow-boxing after the deadliest attack in Kashmir in 30 years of militancy, The Telegraph reports that government advertisements have been…
How India’s newspapers are covering Narendra Modi’s transformation—from a ‘Nero’ who was fiddling when Gujarat was burning, to a ‘Narcissus’ who was filming when CRPF jawans were dying
“Speaking truth to power” is said to be the raison d’être of journalism. “Comforting the afflicted; afflicting the comfortable,” is another variation of it. How well Indian media is performing those duties is evident on the front pages of today’s mainline dailies. On February 14, the day of the deadliest attack on Indian paramilitary forces…
70% of Indians live in the villages but media coverage of rural India is barely 4%, and that is mostly in print media and of non-farm issues
In episode 11 of ‘Shut Up Ya Kunal‘, the poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar tells Kunal Kamra of the abysmal coverage of farm and rural issues in Indian media. Around the 34th minute of the episode, Akhtar says: “In a nation where 70 per cent of the population lives in the countryside and most of…
How ‘Arab News’, the mouthpiece of the ‘House of Saud’, is covering crown prince MBS’s visit to India and Pakistan as clouds of blood hang over the subcontinent
Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman‘s visit to Pakistan and India (and China) couldn’t have been more timely, against the backdrop of the suicide bomber attack in Kashmir, which killed over 40 Indian paramilitary force personnel on Valentine’s Day. And, indeed, against the even more grisly, blood-curdling backdrop of the MBS administration’s role in the…
Indian Women’s Press Corps and Press Club of India condemn “vicious trolling” of mediapersons on social media
*** Updated on February 22, 2019 The following is the statement issued by the Editors Guild of India against the attacks on journalists. The Editors Guild of India strongly condemns the recent tirade of abuse and intimidation against the media and many senior journalists, especially women, in the wake of their reportage and commentary in…
NDTV’s London correspondent cornered, bullied, shouted at anti-terror march by NRIs for doing her job, for working for NDTV: “If you are an Indian, then say ‘Bharat mata ki jai’.”
As India hurtles inexorably towards fulfilling the wet fantasies of idiots itching for action against Pakistan after the deadliest attack in 30 years of militancy in Kashmir—under Narendra Modi‘s magisterial watch—the contours are being framed. Attacking newspapers like Gujarat Samachar. Conditioning minds through embedded channels. Trolling and labelling journalists who counsel sanity. *** NDTV’s excellent…
‘Bhakts’ target ‘Gujarat Samachar’ for mocking Narendra Modi’s inability to stop terror attack in Kashmir, make editor Shreyans Shah’s phone number public, but paper sells like warm ‘dhokla’
For more than two years now, the big buzz in Delhi has been that the only thing that could possibly reverse Narendra Modi‘s (and BJP’s) precipitous nosedive after #Demonetisation was a noisy (and bloody) skirmish with Pakistan. id est: war. The ascent of Imran Khan and his initial overtures halted that talk briefly, but the deadly February…
NDTV’s Ravish Kumar delivers a 400-word masterclass to the studio warriors of the “commando comic channels” itching for war with Pakistan (once again)
*** The deadly attack on a Central Reserve Police Force convoy by a suicide-bomber which killed over 40 in Kashmir on Valentine’s Day was the proverbial lightning rod for studio warriors of what former Indian Express editor Shekhar Gupta calls the “commando comic channels“. Hashtags like #IndiaWantsRevenge roared on Republic TV. #AvengeAwantipora and #PakKeTukdeTukde on NewsX.…
Former TOI journalist named in FIR on ‘Operation Lotus’ gone kaput in which BJP leaders talk of buying up MLAs, Speaker, SC judges with Modi-Shah help
A former journalist of The Times of India has been named in the First Information Report (FIR) in a sensational audio clip in which the BJP leader in Karnataka, B.S Yeddyurappa, offers astounding amounts of money to a JDS MLA’s son. On the 80-minute tape secretly recorded on February 8: # As much as Rs…
The former TOI and ‘Indian Express’ journalist who was told by his Editor not to write “anti-Modi pieces for the time being”—and that was 18 years ago!
Hemantkumar Shah, a journalist with 14 years experience, was a “core group member” of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch till a decade ago, and a “loved child of RSS”. He quit his post as in-charge principal when the management of his Ahmedabad college declined to allow the firebrand MLA Jignesh Mevani to use its auditorium. The…
38% trust news they find in search; 51% trust news sources they use; 23% trust news in social media: Reuters Institute digital media study in 8 graphs
The Reuters Institute for the study of journalism, at Oxford University, has a new report out this June on how digital news is consumed across the world. Here are the salient points of the 2018 Digital News Report based on a respondent size of 74,000 in 37 “markets” in 5 continents.
Calling pesky journalists ‘lifafa’, unleashing trolls to bully them, Pakistan’s Imran Khan has taken a leaf out of Hindustan’s Narendra Modi
The Pakistani journalist Mehmal Sarfraz in The Telegraph, Calcutta: “Censorship is nothing new for the media in Pakistan. While our seniors talk about censorship during General Zia ul-Haq’s times, we remember the censorship when General Pervez Musharraf imposed Emergency just a little over a decade ago. “We are all too familiar with self-censorship as well…
“Anybody can do an MBA. Not everybody can become a cartoonist”: the sage advice that turned Satish Acharya into a 24×7 cartoonist in the social media age
Although the Mysore-born R.K. Laxman is the best known of them all, it is Kerala that has produced more political cartoonists in the English language: P. Shankar Pillai, O.V. Vijayan, Abu Abraham, Kutty, Unny, Ravi Shankar, Ajit Ninan et al. In recent years, Satish Acharya has joined his Kannadiga torch-bearer as a political cartoonist of promise,…
‘The Sunday Guardian’ goes after its pet-hate (P. Chidambaram) for the ‘coup’ report in ‘The Indian Express’. But Rediff had reported the story 22 days earlier and the Army itself had held a briefing.
The Indian Express‘s front-page, full page, three-deck, four-byline, eight-column banner story in 2012—hinting at an attempted “coup” against the Manmohan Singh government, but without using the C-word—has come back to haunt the newspaper five years on, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi seemingly raising the issue in his last address to Parliament. Modi hinted at a report in The Sunday…
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