The BJP’s “prime ministerial candidate” Narendra Modi has, at best, enjoyed a tenuous relationship with the media and media professionals. Although media houses which he spurned are now eating out of his hands, the Gujarat chief minister continues to be generally more comfortable with owners, whom he gives helicopter rides or calls on personally while…
Tag Archives: Narendra Damodardas Modi
Can the Indian media ask Modi tough questions?
Interviews of Narendra Modi are like city buses. There is not one for ages, and then two come along at the same time. The first with the journalist-academic and undisguised Modi shill, Madhu Kishwar, for India News and NewsX; and the other for the Mukesh Ambani-owned ETV Rajasthan. In the Indian Express, Shailaja Bajpai compares…
Is ‘Modi media’ paving way for ‘soft-Fascism’?
In an opinion piece in The Times of India, the academic and international affairs analyst Kanti Bajpai says an India under Narendra Modi will be marked by “soft-fascism—a society marked by slightly less extreme levels fo authoritarinism, intimidation, chauvinism, submission and social Darwinism as classical fascism—and he includes the media as being among the four…
On TV, Congress loses to BJP, Left loses to AAP
The point has been made before, that the current political coverage, especially on television, is more than somewhat skewed, tilting unabashedly towards Narendra Damodardas Modi of the BJP vis-a-vis Rahul Gandhi of the Congress. Now, the CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechuri explicates it a bit more in the Hindustan Times, comparing the TV coverage of Arvind…
When journo dedicates book to journo, it’s news
Tens of Indian journalists are writing books these days and there are all manner of dedications. But Manoj Mitta‘s The Fiction of Fact-finding: Modi and Godhra stands out from the crowd for who it remembers. The Times of India‘s senior editor, who co-authored a seminal book on the 1984 pogrom in Delhi, dedicates his latest…
Narendra Modi, Mukesh Ambani & Network 18
In the latest issue of Open magazine, former NDTV and Headlines Today journalist-turned-academic Sandeep Bhushan, throws light on how the television media is covering the BJP’s “prime ministerial candidate” Narendra Modi: “Several past and serving employees of the media behemoth Network 18 have told me that a heavy-duty ‘go-soft-on-Modi’ campaign is underway within the group.…
Not just a newspaper, a no-paid-news newspaper!
It speaks for the level of distrust that the media has managed to earn for itself that the front page of the Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar carries an emblem in Hindi (right) alongside the masthead, in the space usually reserved for ear-panel advertisements, proclaiming “No Paid News”. Two years ago, the Bombay newspaper DNA, in…
‘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…
Is ‘Modi Media’ biased against Rahul Gandhi?
In a cash-strapped election season which has seen “corporate interest and media ownership” converge, it is arguable if Narendra Modi is getting a free run. Every whisper of the Gujarat chief minister and BJP “prime ministerial aspirant” is turned into a mighty roar, sans scrutiny, as the idiot box ends up being a soapbox of…
Will The Telegraph, Calcutta, be around in 2024?
The news of former Bihar chief minister Laloo Prasad Yadav being sentenced to five years in jail for the fodder scam under his watch was reported in the same old way by most newspapers which think readers do not have access to radios, TVs, laptops, tablets and mobile phones. Not The Telegraph. The Calcutta newspaper,…
Indian Express, Shekhar Gupta & Gen V.K. Singh
For the second time in 18 months, the northern edition of Viveck Goenka‘s Indian Express (sold in the south as The National Standard) has been drawn into a blazing row between the Congress-led UPA government and the then (and now retired) chief of the Army staff, General V.K. Singh. *** In April 2012, the Express…
How Narendra Modi buys media through PR
In the latest issue of Open magazine, its deputy political editor Jatin Gandhi lays his hand on a “Request for Proposal” (RFP) document of the Gujarat government that shows how “almost every day, the Indian media—and sometimes the foreign media too—is tricked or influenced by Narendra Modi‘s public relations machinery”. Exempli gratia: “Modi’s Rambo act,…
Reuters’ Modi interview: “Sensational tokenism”
Reuters‘ scoop interview with Narendra Modi published yesterday by the news agency, but apparently given 17 days ago on June 25, has created headlines for the Gujarat chief minister’s continuing lack of contrition for what happened under his watch in 2002. And for his faux pas of comparing the victims to “kutte ka bachcha” (puppies).…
‘Can the media find a middle ground on Modi?’
CNN-IBN editor in-chief Rajdeep Sardesai in his nationally syndicated column, in the Hindustan Times: “The mainstream media has always had a more uneven relationship with Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s acolytes would like to suggest that the mainstream media has always been anti-Modi and has hounded the BJP’s rising star with a ferocity that…
‘Network 18’s multimedia Modi feast, a promo’
As news channels bend backwards to give flight to Narendra Modi‘s prime ministerial ambitions, the Indian Express‘ television critic, Pratik Kanjilal, writes on the Mukesh Ambani-controlled Network 18‘s unquestioning schmoozefest with the Gujarat chief minister: “Modi also addressed a business forum in Kolkata, but the big one was the multimedia love-feast organised by Network 18.…
‘For cash-stuck TV, Modi is cost-effective TRP’
Shailaja Bajpai in the Indian Express: “If it’s Saturday, it must be Narendra Modi. If it’s Sunday, it must be Modi. If it’s Monday, it must be Modi and even if it’s Tuesday, it must be Modi. You get the general drift? “Every day is Modi-day on television news. One morning, they telecast his speech…
Plug for Modi gets ‘Organiser’ editor RSS boot?
Radhika Ramaseshan reports in The Telegraph, Calcutta, on the editorial movements in the mouthpieces of the sangh parivar: “Ostensibly unconnected to Narendra Modi‘s [re-election and elevation to the BJP parliamentary board] was the recent exit of the editors of the Sangh’s Hindi and English weeklies, Panchjanya and Organiser, Baldev Sharma and R. Balashankar. “When contacted,…
When nothing’s sacred, everything’s suspect
In the cynicism that now envelopes modern Indian journalism, even the Ramnath Goenka awards for excellence in journalism awarded by the Indian Express are not beyond ideologically motivated barbs. This letter to the editor of The Pioneer was published by the right-wing daily on Wednesday, 28 July, and it leaves no room for doubt about…
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