Conflict of interest is the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. The official kit sponsor of the Indian cricket team is MPL: Mobile Premier League, ostensibly a fantasy game. And MPL’s unashamed brand ambassador is the team’s captain Virat Kohli. The Indian Express reveals today that Kohli has been allotted debentures worth Rs 33.32 lakh…
Tag Archives: Private Treaties
If The Economist looks at Tamil Nadu, it’s news?
In a bleak advertising scenario, Indian magazines have been pushed into running cheap and ugly advertisements, advertorials, and other intrusions dressed up as thinly disguised “innovations”, like a bit of editorial here for an ad elsewhere, to keep the ship afloat. But The Economist, too? The latest issue of the “newspaper” (as the magazine calls…
New Yorker carries TOI response, 7 months later
Exactly seven months after The New Yorker carried a nine-page profile of Samir Jain, Vineet Jain and The Times of India by its acclaimed media critic Ken Auletta, the magazine has carried a response from TOI’s executive editor, Arindam Sen Gupta, in its May 5 issue, on medianet, private treaties and other subsidiary issues. Image: courtesy…
A town shuts down to protest media corruption!
Unbelievable as it may sound, residents of the town of Mudhol in North Karnataka observed a bandh (shutdown) on Tuesday, September 20, to protest “blackmail journalism” and the growing number of imposters masquerading as journalists to extort money. According to a report in the Kannada daily Praja Vani, the bandh in the town of 100,000…
Should ‘media corruption’ come under Lokpal?
The more-than-just-a-neutral-observer position taken by sections of the media on the Anna Hazare agitation has clearly begun to rile politicians, and at least two of them cutting across party lines have argued in the last couple of days that the media too must be brought under the purview of the proposed anti-corruption legislation. Exhibit A: Union…
Why is Rupert Murdoch taking on Samir Jain?
New Delhi’s media circles have agog all this week with news of a “sting” operation on The Times of India by The Sunday Times of London. The question: why would Rupert Murdoch‘s paper take on Samir Jain‘s, especially when it is not revealing anything particularly new? Is something afoot between the media giants? Has a…
‘If we don’t get it first, why should we want it?’
Network 18 bossman, Raghav Bahl, receives some loaded questions from Sunil Jain of the Financial Express, in an interaction with journalists of the The Indian Express group: Sunil Jain: The SEBI chief [M. Damodaran] once spoke of “anchor-investors”. Also, how do you justify your getting into private treaties? Raghav Bahl: On “anchor-investors”, I never quite…
Income, outgo, assets, liabilities, profit and loss
With journalistic integrity, both individual and institutional, increasingly under question with the spurt of paid news, private treaties, mediating, brokering and other wheeling and dealing, there have been growing calls for journalists to also declare their assets and liabilities, much like politicians, judges and bureaucrats. Ravi Belagere (in picture), the colourful and sometimes controversial editor…
Jessica Lal verdict proof that Indian media works
The Supreme Court of India has upheld the life sentence awarded by the Delhi high court to Manu Sharma, the son of Congress leader and former Union minister Vinod Sharma, for killing Jessica Lal, who had declined to serve him a drink after the bar had closed in Delhi, in 1999. Manu Sharma’s counsel, the…
The decentralisation of paid-for news begins
The election commission of India likes to pretend that it came to know of the phenomenon of “paid news”—advertisements being slipped in under the garb of news to circumvent expenditure norms— only after recent reports of its widespread use during the 2009 recent general elections. Well, here’s more news for the EC. A journalist with…
As the year ends, a veteran’s lament for media
B.G. Verghese in Deccan Herald: “As the year closes, one must with sadness and shame pen a lament for the Indian media…. We must lament a disgraceful fall in standards as revealed by well documented stories of the sale of electoral coverage by sections of the news media through ‘packages’ relating to the kind of…
‘Indian media in deeply murky ethical territory’
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has, in a party resolution, decried cross-media ownership and warned of the growth of monopolies in the Indian media. It has also slammed the corporatisation of the media, and demanded that the brakes be applied on foreign direct investment in the media which “has made a section of the…
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