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: Reliance Industries
How Reliance Jio drove data usage, erased the line between content and carriage, and is making life hell for India’s news media
*** In this, the second and concluding part of a two-part excerpt from his new book Freedom, Civility, Commerce, journalist and academic Sukumar Muralidharan turns his eye on the mysterious entry of Reliance Jio, and what it portends for the media. *** By SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN Statistics may often have no more than transient utility in…
Steve Forbes named in Forbes India legal notice
Three of the four Forbes India editors, who were forced out of the fortnightly business magazine allegedly for demanding that the promoters fulfill their contractual commitments on employee stock options (ESOPs), have shot off legal notices to Network 18 and Forbes Media, demanding immediate reinstatement and settlement of dues and damages for loss of livelihood,…
‘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.…
Mukesh Ambani ‘sues’ TV channels on Kejriwal
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, and India’s most powerful business house, Reliance Industries, are believed to have served a legal notice on several TV news channels for airing anti-corruption activist Arvind Kejriwal‘s allegations against them in October and November last year. However, it is not known if Kejriwal, a former…
HT wedding unites Ambanis and Birlas
News of a wedding that brings India’s most powerful corporate, Reliance Industries, closer to India’s second largest English newspaper, Hindustan Times, which is headed by the Congress member of Parliament Shobhana Bhartia. From Mail Today, the tabloid newspaper from the India Today group: Mukesh Ambani‘s home Antilia has seen a number of parties in the…
ET joins Mint, has questions on RIL-TV18 deal
Two days after Mint front-paged a story that SEBI was looking into the Reliance-Network18/TV18-ETV deal, the country’s biggest business newspaper, The Economic Times has joined force. A story on page 9 of ET, headlined “Will the RIL-TV18 deal trigger takeover code?“, says SEBI “may ask for details” about Reliance funding Network18/TV18 to help it purchase…
Will RIL-TV18-ETV deal win SEBI, CCI approval?
PRITAM SENGUPTA in New Delhi and KEERTHI PRATIPATI in Hyderabad write: Media criticism in India, especially in the so-called mainstream media, has never been much to write home about. Operating on the principle that writing on another media house or media professional means exposing yourself to the same danger in the future, proprietors, promoters and…
Why hasn’t India thrown up a media mogul?
Indian media houses, promoters and practitioners are gung-ho about foreign direct investment (FDI) in all sectors except the media, under the specious argument that the media is not a “commodity”, etc. Media barons who justify the worst excesses of modern Indian media under the this-is-what-the-consumer-wants logic, somehow find it convenient to block FDI in media…
The Indian Express, Reliance and Shekhar Gupta
The shadow of Mukesh Ambani‘s Reliance Industries (RIL) has hung heavily over the northern editions of the Indian Express for the last seven years, in a marked departure from the late 1980s when Ramnath Goenka‘s paper was seen as Dhirubhai Ambani‘s chief bully and bugbear. Tongues have wagged incessantly about how well paid Express staffers are…
Larry Summers, YSR, the Ambanis & Mark Ames
Mark Ames, the expat American editor of eXiled (“Mankind’s only alternative since 1997”), whose blog speculation on an Ambani hand in the helicopter crash that killed Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy caused rioters to attack Reliance properties in that State last wek, is baffled by the “class war” that has broken out in…
The sad and pathetic decline of Arun Shourie
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: Arun Shourie is one of the strangest cases on the Indian intellectual landscape if not its most disappointing. A living, walking, moving advertisement of how rabid ideology can addle even the most riveting of minds, stripping it of all its nuance and pretence; its very soul and humanity. *** Once…
Why the Indian media does not take on Ambanis
Anand Giridharadas has a lengthy profile of Mukesh Ambani, the bossman of Reliance Industries, in Sunday’s New York Times. As usual, there are a couple of paragraphs on the Ambanis’ messy relationship with the media. “Critics say Reliance has been especially effective at managing the press. [Two] former Reliance executives, who requested anonymity for fear…
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