https://soundcloud.com/user-311470525/j-pod-paranjoy-guha-thakurta There once used to be a time when any new announcement by Reliance Industries would be put under the microscope by the media and examined with a fine toothcomb. A rights issue, a new venture. a tie-up, even a routine annual general meeting (AGM). Everything would be inspected with forensic detail by newspapers like the…
Tag Archives: EPW
J-POD || Podcast || “COVID has given us a brain scan of media thinking. National newspapers devote 0.67% of front page to 69% of India. Corporate media is the bed on which religious and market fundamentalists cohabit” || P. Sainath
https://soundcloud.com/user-311470525/j-pod-p-sainath-on-the-media *** Less than 2% of India’s population is invested in stocks and mutual funds. Yet, India has at least half-a-dozen business newspapers in English. And just as many business news channels. Every newspaper in every language, in every part of the country, has a page—or half of page—dedicated to business news. Or what they think is…
J-POD || Podcast || “A good newspaper is a companion in life’s shared journey. It prepares you to live in a diverse, contentious society. Social media gives you a hollow sense of control” || philosopher Prof Sundar Sarukkai
https://soundcloud.com/user-311470525/j-pod-fear-and-the-future-prof/s-wjjY2lqReCf *** All through history, the rise of the right wing has seen a rage against intellectuals in public life. In India where politics sets the pace and everything else follows in its wake, this is especially evident in the news media. Rare is the newspaper or news magazine today which values experience and expertise of…
Wisdom at the ‘Sangam’: Journalist Jawid Laiq has called seven elections in the last 42 years with greater accuracy than exit pollsters just by dipping his finger in the Ganga. Will 2019 reverse that trend?
After watching Indians at a polling booth and failing to read their mind on which way they were inclined to vote, James Reston, the late executive editor of The New York Times, grandly concluded that an election was a secret communion between a voter and democracy—it is sacrilegious to pry. Now, where “Scotty” wrote this…
RIL, Network18 & the loss of media heterogeneity
Even as the takeover of Network18 by India’s biggest corporate house, Reliance Industries Limited, receives scant scrutiny in the mainstream media on what it portends in the long term, the journalist and educator Paranjoy Guha Thakurta weighs in, in the Economic & Political Weekly: “The consequence of RIL strengthening its association with Network18 is a…
‘Media freedom bleaker with Ambani domination’
The takeover of Network 18 group with its myriad news, business and entertainment channels has received scant review in the Indian media, but the author Pankaj Mishra bells the cat in Bloomberg View: “There is no denying that the future of media freedom in India looks even bleaker than ever after Mukesh Ambani’s Silvio Berlusconi-style…
When a mainstream newspaper debates ‘caste’
Do caste experiences and untouchability really exist in India, particularly in urban and middle-class India? The answer depends on who you ask although the usual newsroom tendency is to turn the nose away. So, how do we find out beyond what we think we know? In the first half of 2013, the mass-circulated Kannada newspaper…
’50-60% China coverage in TOI, HT adversarial’
A six-month study of India-China coverage in the top-two English newspapers in New Delhi shows that between 50 and 60 per cent of the stories are of adversarial nature, “establishing a pattern of clear negative China coverage”. The Delhi editions of The Times of India and the Hindustan Times, both of which have correspondents based…
Sen-Bhagwati row in media silly season: EPW
Editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly: “July and August are the months of the “silly season” for the newspapers in the United Kingdom; with everyone on a summer holiday the papers are compelled to look for silly stories to fill the pages. The Indian media – especially the financial press – seems to be…
‘TV is manufacturing news & consent for State’
Former NDTV and Headlines Today reporter Sandeep Bhushan, now an academic at the Jamia Millia Islamia, in the Economic & Political Weekly: “The news studio has become the site for “manufacturing” news and consent on behalf of the beleaguered state. This is largely the product of an unprecedented financial crisis which has threatened media’s advertisement-based…
EPW tears into TV’s ‘hawks, hotheads, hysteria’
The Economic & Political Weekly has an editorial in its January 26 issue on the dangerous role played by Indian TV channels when the news of the beheading of an Indian soldier on the border came in two weeks ago. “Television news,” says EPW, “is fast becoming the most dangerous extremist in India’s civil society.…
Africa-watcher Hari Sharan Chhabra is no more
On the pages of The Times of India in Delhi, the grim news of the passing of an Indian who looked at a part of the world most of the media doesn’t: Hari Sharan Chhabra, editor of Africa Diary and World Focus and a frequent contributor to the Economic & Political Weekly (EPW). Chhabra’s elder…
EPW on the RIL-ETV-TV18 deal-within-a-deal
In the latest issue of the Economic & Political Weekly, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Subi Chaturvedi weigh in on the nearly forgotten RIL-ETV-TV18 deal, which gives India’s biggest business house control over India’s biggest business news channel, a clutch of news channels, online properties and magazines: “If international best practices are to be followed, cross-media…
EPW, the ‘Economist’ of emerging countries?
The former West Bengal finance minister, economist and left ideologue, Ashok Mitra, in The Telegraph, Calcutta: “Gentlemen do not engage in public brawl; if they have a grievance to air, they write to the London Times. That was the British code…. The Indian gentry, as could only be expected, inherited the code of the ruling nation…. For…
EPW journalist bags Appan Menon award
Srinivasan Ramani, a senior assistant editor with the journal Economic & Political Weekly (EPW), has bagged the Appan Menon memorial award for young journalists. Ramani, who is pursuing his PhD in international at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), won the prize for his coverage of India’s role in the emergence of Nepal’s new constitutional republic.…
Top-6 dailies devote 2% coverage on rural issues
“India lives in its villages.” “Agriculture accounts for 60% of the Indian economy.” “Two out of every three Indians live in the rural areas.” The cliches abound about Bharat id est India. Yet, a study of India’s top-three English and Hindi newspapers shows that they devote only a minuscule porportion of their total coverage to…
Economic & Political Weekly wants a web editor
The Economic & Political Weekly is looking for a web editor who will be in charge of its online edition. The duties of the web editor would be to commission contemporary commentaries, invite blogs, moderate discussions and work towards developing a distinct identity for the online edition. The web editor would work with the editorial…
Anybody here with an open mind & reads English?
Palagummi Sainath has been the stalwart correspondent of our times. In an era of “feel-good” journalism, the Hindu‘s rural affairs editor has an been unapologetic harbinger of drought, disease, despair and death from parts of Bharat that the Indian mass media can’t reach, won’t reach, and no longer wants to reach. At the same time,…
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