Anita Pratap, the Bangalore University journalism student whose byline—when bylines still had value—adorned Sunday and India Today magazines, Time and CNN, is in the news. Pratap, reputedly the first journalist to interview Velupillai Prabhakaran, when he lived in Chennai in 1985, features in Methagu (His Excellency), a biopic on the slain supremo of the Liberation…
Tag Archives: CNN
Can ‘Modi Sarkar’ create an Indian CNN or BBC?
The point has been made before but bears repetition. If Britain can have a BBC, if America can have CNN, if Qatar can have Al Jazeera, if China can have CCTV, if Russia can have Russia Today, why cannot India? Why do Indian broadcasters, public, private or autonomous, not have the vision or the resources…
‘Media’s Modi-fixation needs medical attention’
The relationship between Gujarat chief minister Narendra Damodardas Modi and the media, especially “English maedia” as he puts it, has followed two distinct trends over the last ten years. The first trend was of unbridled distrust on either side. Modi had nothing but contempt for those who sought to buttonhole him on the ghastly incidents…
Where was Priyanka Chopra going with Bob?*
There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip in the era of fast-breaking news and even well-equipped organisations like CNN and BBC are not immune from howlers in the “supers”. On Tuesday, when the Congress president Sonia Gandhi was rushed to hospital, look who was momentarily accompanying her son-in-law Robert Vadra to look…
V.N. Subba Rao: a ‘shishya’ remembers his Guru
There are few more misleading terms in Indian journalism than the phrase “national media”. Only those who flit around in the rarefied circles of Delhi and Bombay, rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty, qualify; everyone else is “upcountry”. Only the bold-faced names from big English media houses are supposed to be national; everyone else…
Fareed Zakaria: ‘a barometer in a good suit’
The liberal American magazine The New Republic has compiled a list of “the most over-rated thinkers in Washington D.C.“, and Padma Bhushan Fareed Zakaria, the Bombay-born former editor of Newsweek International and an editor-at-large at Time magazine, makes it with ease: “Fareed Zakaria is enormously important to an understanding of many things, because he provides a…
A pre-Google ‘Bomb Mama’ of nuclear prolificity
The passing away of K. Subrahmanyam, the bureaucrat turned strategic affairs expert and journalist, at the age of 82 after a valiant battle with cancer, has provoked a flurry of warm tributes in newspapers. The former Economic Times editor Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, who brought “Subbu” into ET, recalls Subrahmanyam’s prolificity: “Many journalists have trouble…
Would our media spend Rs 20 lakh on a ‘junket’?
A PTI story estimating US President Barack Obama‘s India trip at $200 million a day prompted CNN anchor Anderson Cooper to do some number-crunching, and elicited a column from Pulitzer prize winning New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman, and a response from PTI editor-in-chief M.K. Razdan. Now, the Indian Express has a diary…
Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria gets Padma Bhushan
Fareed Zakaria, the Bombay-born editor of Newsweek International and the host of CNN’s GPS, has been decorated with India’s third highest civilian award, the Padma Bhushan. Zakaria’s name finds mention in the annual Republic Day honours’ list released by the ministry of home affairs. Zakaria, whose mother Fatma Zakaria was one of the stellar names…
BBC journalists secure abducted cop’s release
It’s one of journalism’s oldest questions: should journalists in the line of duty play a part in unfolding news events? Should they be the eyes and ears of their audience at all times, as expected of their profession, regardless of the situation? Or, are there occasions when exceptions can be made like, say, a life…
What if nobody wants the serious stuff?
Ted Turner who created CNN and invented the 24-hour news cycle, on celebrity journalism, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “The greatest fear we could possibly have today is an uninformed electorate. That is what really scares me.” Read the full article: 70 years of Ted Turner
Media freedom is what separates India & China
No media debate on Asia is complete with0ut comparing India to China, or vice-versa. Even among middle-class media consumers, there is a barely disguised contempt for the slow pace of growth in democratic India, for all the “obstacles” in the path of progress and development, compared with the frenetic pace in The Middle Kingdom. But…
‘I never learned a thing when I was talking’
“There’s something I learned long ago: I never learned a thing when I was talking,” says Larry King, host of CNN’s Larry King Live, answering readers’ queries in Time. Q: Whom do you most want to interview that you haven’t yet? A: Fidel Castro certainly. Always wanted to interview a Pope. Any Pope. And J.D.…
When an Indian journo shouted at Prabhakaran
Dozens of journalists have written on the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Velupillai Prabhakaran, whose death was announced to the world by Sri Lanka on Tuesday, May 18. On rediff.com, Athimuthu Ganesh Nadar writes of his encounter with Prabhakaran seven years ago when he was among 350 international journalists who attended…
Ted Turner on the future of papers, magazines
Is the relentless torrent of breaking news—on television, through the internet, on the mobile phone, etc—making newspapers and magazines irrelevant? Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, answers the age-old question from reader Kristina Popski in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the latest issue of Time magazine: “No. I think it has made people more interested in news…
Who decides what we should/shouldn’t watch?
News has not been in short supply in the global village in the satellite age. There are the “Indian” English news channels: NDTV 24×7, CNN-IBN, Times Now, Headlines Today. And the Hindi news channels: Aaj Tak, Star News, NDTV India, IBN 7, DD News, India TV. And the language news channels: Udaya, Sun, Suvarna, TV9,…
A voice, a face, a legend is gone: RIP
Tim Russert, the chubby but stern face of American political journalism, “the greatest political interviewer of our time and maybe all time,” has passed away after a “sudden heart attack”. He was 58. Moderator of the flagship Sunday morning program Meet the Press and the Washington bureau chief of NBC, the proud son of a…
‘News shows are getting comedic and vice-versa’
The New York Times‘ three-time Pulitzer Prize winning foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman has “scooped” an Iranian intelligence note to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which in a strange sort of way captures the truth about the news business in America: “We have to note that obtaining open-source intelligence in America has become more difficult, because…
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