India’s language press has been a key force-multiplier of the Hindutva cause—and ipso facto of the RSS-BJP agenda. This is breezily attributed to the language media being more in tune with the aspirations of “real India”. Today’s front pages on the foundation stone being laid for the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, are less a product…
Tag Archives: babri masjid
J-POD || Podcast || “In 1992, journalists had to be beaten up to stop them from telling the Ayodhya story. Today it will appear on page 8. English media will go Hindi way soon” || Seema Chishti on covering the Babri Masjid demolition
https://soundcloud.com/user-311470525/j-pod-the-story-that-changed-a *** Most journalists will confess that “changing people’s lives” was one of the reasons they got into the profession. Some might even remember this or that story that indeed changed a few lives. But not too many can claim that they actually reported a story that changed a billion lives, in fact changed a nation. The…
How 15 brave reporters and photographers have defended the evidence they collected of Babri Masjid demolition
Excellent story in The Economic Times today of how reporters and photographers staved off a bid to discredit their great work, the midst of grave danger to their life abd limb, during the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, by sangh parivar hoodlums. Screenshot: courtesy The Economic Times
Why Khushwant Singh fell out with Arun Shourie
Khushwant Singh, former editor of Hindustan Times and the now-defunct Illustrated Weekly of India, on why he is no longer friends with Arun Shourie, the Magsaysay Award-winning former editor of Indian Express, in the Hindustan Times: “There was a time when I was a frequent diner in the Shouries’ household in Delhi…. At one of the…
Note to directors: It was Shammy not Barkha
No One Killed Jessica? Well, someone ‘killed’ Harinder Baweja. Raj Kumar Gupta, the director of last weekend’s multiplex marvel—in which Rani Mukherji essays the role of a single, bitchy, aggressive, passionate, foul-mouthed, investigative journalist probing the murder of the model Jessica Lal at a Delhi bar—may have made the world believe that his ‘wet dream’…
Dishing out news means flouting parking rules
A line of outdoor broadcast (OB) vans occupy one half of the road outside the Supreme Court of India on Tuesday, 28 September 2010, the day the highest court in the land ruled that the judgement in the Ayodhya title suit could be pronounced without any further delay. Below, the media scrum sticks the mike…
‘The Tribune broke Liberhan story 5 months ago’
The “national” media in India—a loose moniker that alludes to Delhi-based newspapers, magazines and TV stations—are routinely accused of picking up stories from the regional language press and passing them off as “exclusives” when no one is watching. Fingers are now being pointed at the northern editions of The Indian Express which on November 23…
IJR 