India’s richest family, the Ambanis, have had a long and tortuous tryst with the media. The subject of well-deserved scrutiny for their less-than-clean methods when India still had a moral compass, they have been media promoters, off and on, with mixed success, in post-liberalised times. But for the most part, the Ambanis have been seen…
Tag Archives: Anil Ambani
How ‘The Indian Express’ is covering the #Rafale scandal—and a scandal it is—compared to the way it covered #Bofors
The Congress president Rahul Gandhi has addressed five press conferences on the Rs 140,000 crore Rafale aircraft deal involving the Narendra Modi government and the bankrupt businessman Anil Ambani. These press conferences have been on 30 August, 22 September, 11 October, 25 October and 2 November 2018, and they have all been held in New…
Operation Rajnikant: starring Samir & Vineet Jain
There are 12 media personalities in the Indian Express list of the most powerful Indians in 2014—“ie 100″—for 2014, but 10 of them are proprietors, only one is a journalist and the other is a former journalist. As usual, the most interesting part of the prospective list are the factoids accompanying the profiles. # 19,…
2,450 journos lost jobs in Chitty Chitty Bong Bong
Mail Today, the tabloid daily owned by the India Today group, reports that an astonishing 2,450 journalists (including non-editorial staff) may have lost their jobs after the meltdown of Bengal’s chitfund driven, politically backed newspapers and TV stations. Employees of Saradha group owned 24-hour TV news station, Channel 10, are reported to have filed a…
Mukesh Ambani ‘sues’ TV channels on Kejriwal
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, and India’s most powerful business house, Reliance Industries, are believed to have served a legal notice on several TV news channels for airing anti-corruption activist Arvind Kejriwal‘s allegations against them in October and November last year. However, it is not known if Kejriwal, a former…
HT wedding unites Ambanis and Birlas
News of a wedding that brings India’s most powerful corporate, Reliance Industries, closer to India’s second largest English newspaper, Hindustan Times, which is headed by the Congress member of Parliament Shobhana Bhartia. From Mail Today, the tabloid newspaper from the India Today group: Mukesh Ambani‘s home Antilia has seen a number of parties in the…
The Ambani brothers, TOI, Medianet & paid news
The “reverse-swing” done on Zee News by Jindal Steel is one of the most intriguing media stories in recent memory. The steel company says it is suing the Subhash Chandra-owned network for Rs 200 crore for the demand of Rs 100 crore in lieu of advertisements allegedly made by its editors, Sudhir Chaudhary and Sameer…
Will RIL-TV18-ETV deal win SEBI, CCI approval?
PRITAM SENGUPTA in New Delhi and KEERTHI PRATIPATI in Hyderabad write: Media criticism in India, especially in the so-called mainstream media, has never been much to write home about. Operating on the principle that writing on another media house or media professional means exposing yourself to the same danger in the future, proprietors, promoters and…
Lessons for Vir & Barkha from Prem & Nikhilda
By T.J.S. GEORGE Journalism started going astray with the birth of financial dailies in the 1960s. With full-fledged newspapers devoted exclusively to business, corporate houses became hyperactive. The next thing we knew was press conferences ending with gifts of expensive sarees and suitlengths to reporters. That was innocent child play compared to what has hit…
Ambani book review, a response and a riposte
Its original avatar,The Polyester Prince, failed to see the light of day after injunctions were secured against its release in several cities. Now, an updated version of Sydney Morning Herald journalist Hamish McDonald‘s book on the Ambanis has surprisingly hit the stands under a new title, Ambani & Sons. Shantanu Guha-Ray, the business editor of…
Larry Summers, YSR, the Ambanis & Mark Ames
Mark Ames, the expat American editor of eXiled (“Mankind’s only alternative since 1997”), whose blog speculation on an Ambani hand in the helicopter crash that killed Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy caused rioters to attack Reliance properties in that State last wek, is baffled by the “class war” that has broken out in…
Sorry, brother, we got a few million $$$ wrong
The battle between Dhirubhai Ambani‘s children—Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani, and children they truly are—also has a small but remarkable media subtext. Both “camps” scour through news reports with a fine toothcomb, and both “camps” are not unknown to plant a few saplings in fertile newspapers and magazines to score points. This clarification appears in…
Why the Indian media does not take on Ambanis
Anand Giridharadas has a lengthy profile of Mukesh Ambani, the bossman of Reliance Industries, in Sunday’s New York Times. As usual, there are a couple of paragraphs on the Ambanis’ messy relationship with the media. “Critics say Reliance has been especially effective at managing the press. [Two] former Reliance executives, who requested anonymity for fear…
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