The Indian Express‘s front-page, full page, three-deck, four-byline, eight-column banner story in 2012—hinting at an attempted “coup” against the Manmohan Singh government, but without using the C-word—has come back to haunt the newspaper five years on, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi seemingly raising the issue in his last address to Parliament. Modi hinted at a report in The Sunday…
Tag Archives: The Sunday Guardian
When Union ministers date journalists, it’s news?
From Buzzword, the gossip column of The Sunday Guardian: There’s more sleaze in Congress cupboard Congress leaders are in a state of shock over revelations on Digvijay Singh‘s secret love life with a married TV journalist. They are worried that more such skeletons will tumble out of their leaders’ cupboards. There are indications that BJP…
‘Modi Wave’ can also touch a CPI(M) newspaper
From Buzzword, the gossip column of The Sunday Guardian: The Communists in Kerala were left red-faced when the CPI(M) newspaper Deshabhimani carried a full page advertisement by Narendra Modi‘s Gujarat government. The advertisement, highlighting Gujarat’s Mahatma Gandhi Swachchata Mission, features a huge Modi portrait. When taken to task, the newspaper management defended their act by…
Jessica Lal, Tehelka, Bina Ramani & the media
It was in South Delhi socialite Bina Ramani‘s Tamarind Court restaurant that Jessica Lall, a “model who worked as a celebrity barmaid”, was shot dead in 1999 by Manu Sharma, the son of Congress politician Venod Sharma. Initially exonerated of the charges, the case turned full turtle for Sharma following a sting operation by Harinder…
The UPA minister who is a TV news editor is…
Virendra Kapoor in The Sunday Guardian: BENDING THE MEDIA There is this senior minister in the UPA government, who is so sensitive to what the media says and writes about him that he invariably gets on the phone to the media owner to complain against even a passing mention which may not be too complimentary…
How corporate ownership shapes TV news?
Virendra Kapoor, former editor of the Free Press Journal, in his column in M.J. Akbar‘s Sunday Guardian: Money speaks The growing intrusion of corporate money into the media is beginning to show in myriad ways. For instance, ever since a big industrial group made a huge investment in a multi-channel television group, its news channel…
New health cards for PIB accreditated journos
Good news for journalists with bad hearts, lungs and kidneys, from the gossip columns of the Sunday papers. From The Telegraph diary: Manmohan Singh has decided to extend a helping hand to journalists. The Centre has accepted a long-standing demand by scribes that new health cards be issued to accreditated journalsits. These health cards will…
Everybody loves writing about Pankaj Pachauri
It is not often that the same piece of political gossip appears in three different newspapers in two different cities on more or less the same day. But in the snakepit of power that is the nation’s capital, it is all in a day’s work, especially if concerns the media advisor to the prime minister,…
How did Robert Vadra vanish off the front pages?
A week is a long time for the media in Scamistan. The ripples caused by Sonia Gandhi‘s son-in-law Robert Vadra‘s real-estate dealings have given way to the hera-pheri of BJP president Nitin Gadkari‘s. The veteran editor and columnist Virendra Kapoor writes in The Sunday Guardian: You can be forgiven if you believe that Nitin Gadkari‘s…
Salman Khurshid, India Today & Sunday Guardian
Salman Khurshid, the Oxford-educated Union law minister, has taken the India Today group to court in Delhi, Bombay, Lucknow and London claiming damages of Rs 243 crore following Aaj Tak‘s sting operation that accused the trust run by his wife, former Sunday magazine journalist Louise Khurshid nee Fernandes, of a discrepancy of Rs 71 lakh.…
How the media viewed Express ‘C’ report
Editorial in Deccan Herald: “There is reason for deep concern over the report in a national daily, The Indian Express, about an ‘unexpected (and non-notified) movement’ of two army units towards Delhi on the night of January 16-17… To insinuate that General V.K. Singh would attempt a coup to settle scores with the government is downright…
‘Mail Today’ rises in the land of ‘The Daily Mail’
Making use of the five-and-a-half hour time gap, Mail Today, the tabloid daily from the India Today group, has expanded its footprint to the United Kingdom. Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie explains the move in a note on page 3: “Targeting the large south Asian population in London, Mail Today wants to connect with the diaspora by…
Did Chidambaram walk out of Express awards?
The grapevine is that some ministers boycotted events in which media houses had chosen members of Team Anna for awards last year. Now, this item appears in the gossip columns of The Sunday Guardian. Apparently home minister P. Chidambaram vamoosed from the Ramnath Goenka excellence in journalism awards function organised by The Indian Express after…
Is UPA hitting back at ToI, India Today, DNA?
There has been plenty of buzz in recent days that the Congress-led UPA government has quietly begun hitting back at the media for the manner in which it has exposed the scams and scandals, and for the proactive manner in which it backed the middle-class led “Arnab Spring”. There have been rumours, for instance, of…
The TV anchor who’s caught Omar Abdullah’s eye
Nora Chopra, the diarist/ gossip columnist of M.J. Akbar‘s weekly newspaper, The Sunday Guardian, gives a delicious little rumour floating around in Delhi some more oxygen. “If the Delhi grapevine is to be believed, Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah and his wife Payal are getting divorced by mutual consent. “The reason behind the…
The journo married to the Rs 100,000 crore heir
In all the wide-eyed reporting on the gold tumbling out of the vaults of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum, reporters have (generally) missed out on one delicious fact: the fact, that one of our ilk is married into the erstwhile royal family of Travancore. That lucky somebody is M.D. Nalapat (left), former resident editor of…
‘The most prolific journalist of our times’
Khushwant Singh on his Illustrated Weekly of India protege M.J. Akbar, in The Telegraph, Calcutta, the “unputdownable” Calcutta paper founded by Akbar in 1982: “M.J. Akbar must be the most prolific journalist of our times. He heads the editorial board of India Today, edits The Sunday Guardian financed by Ram Jethmalani, and writes for many…
Why a unique newspaper isn’t covering the IPL
This week’s Sunday Guardian carries a story on Sparshdnyan, a newspaper in Braille for the visually impaired. Published out of Bombay twice a month, the 48-page paper is sent out to some 400 subscribers in Maharashtra. The paper’s editor Swagat Thorat estimates readership at 24,000 copies per issue, most of them in the 18-35 segment …
Niira Radia, Mukesh Ambani, NDTV & Prannoy Roy
In conversation number #132 in the infamous Niira Radia tapes, the lobbyist whose name has become synonymous with the 2G scam, talks to M.K. Venu, then of The Economic Times, in July 2009: Venu: Is Manoj (Modi) is here (in Delhi) today also, no? Radia: Yeah, he is here, he is leaving in the afternoon,…
‘Credibility is like virginity and it has been lost’
The veteran journalist, columnist and author Kuldip Nayar in The Sunday Guardian: “Credibility is like virginity. It exists or it does not. Unfortunately, some top names in Indian journalism have lost their credibility…. They behaved like power brokers and crossed the Lakshman rekha between legitimate news gathering and lobbying. It is like the fence eating…
IJR 