As the old saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, thrice is enemy action. Or, as we say in journalism, a trend. In the space of just 20 days, two Members of Parliament have been found dead. The first, 7-time MP Mohan Delkar, was found hanging in his hotel room in Bombay in February.…
Tag Archives: The Telegraph
‘The Telegraph’ sports journalist who is now the Chief Justice of Madras High Court
Madras High Court has a new Chief Justice, its 42nd: Justice Sanjib Banerjee. Nothing new there, all high courts have a first among equals. The interesting part comes through two tweets by The Hindu’s legal correspondent, Mohamed Imranullah, who reveals that Justice Banerjee, 60, began his career as a sports journalist with The Telegraph in…
Barring ‘Indian Express’ and ‘Telegraph’, few newspapers ask why an orderly farmers’ protest suddenly went awry
The farmers’ protests in Delhi against new farm laws sneaked in through Parliament, with former ‘Prabhat Khabar‘ editor Harivansh playing a questionable part as Rajya Sabha deputy chair, had been mostly peaceful and exemplary for 66 days. But the “tractor parade” by the farmers on Republic Day, with protesters breaching pre-agreed conditions and “storming” Red…
TV coverage of farmers’ protests in Delhi shows that “farmers claim an integrity in the Indian subconscious that the media lack”
The academic and public intellectual Shiv Visvanathan, has a piece in The Telegraph on the ongoing farmers’ protests in Delhi, demanding the repeal of new laws passed by the BJP-led government: “Yet more than the State with its idiotic ideas of governance, it is television media that is uncomfortable with the farmers’ strike, seeking to…
Looking at most front page headlines on Diego Maradona, you would wonder if the football genius ever used his foot
Football-crazy Bengal has easily beaten football-crazy Kerala and football-crazy Goa in its coverage of the passing of Argentinian legend Diego Maradona. The Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika (above) has a classy front page, and calm and unckuttered inside pages, in contrast to the early editions of Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi (below). *** The Goan newspapers are…
J-POD || Podcast || “Aveek Sarkar ranks among the best. Without Rupert Murdoch, British press would have been killed off” || Amit Roy, foreign correspondent twice over
A foreign correspondent is an exotic bird quickly going extinct. Once upon a time, newspapers had correspondents in many of the world’s news hotspots: Washington and London certainly but also Islamabad and Colombo, Dubai and Dhaka. Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Johannesburg, Sao Paolo have all seen an Indian presence at one time or the…
Make Art Great Again: the MAGA movement that Indian newspapers sorely need after Donald Trump’s welcome exit
In India’s massive media universe, only The Telegraph is able to capture the significance of the Biden-Harris win in the US elections, that denies oxygen to four more years of unbridled hatred, poison, division, violence and fact-free leadership. “America, unlike India, makes America great again,” says the Telegraph headline. But for the most part Indian…
J-POD || Podcast || “Because of COVID very few journalists are on the ground, very few are travelling, very few are interacting the way they would. Take everything with a pinch of salt”|| Bihar veteran Uttam Sengupta
Generally speaking, political analysis on Indian television has been as reliable as the weather report and as insightful as astrological predictions—but just a little less fun than the comic strip. The assembly elections in Bihar five Novembers years ago showed what a joke it was. Even on the day of the counting, even as the…
How a London tabloid reporter’s interview paved the way for Argentina’s president to be India’s Republic Day guest after the Falklands War
Peregrine Worsthorne, the former Editor of The Sunday Telegraph, London, passed away recently. In The Telegraph, Calcutta, the paper’s fantastic London correspondent Amit Roy remembers this lovely anecdote of Worsthorne. “Another charming and eloquent editor of my acquaintance, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who was briefly editor of The Sunday Telegraph, has been in the news. “Perry”, whose…
‘Time and Tide’ waits for no man: after 157 Tests, Kishore Bhimani ties up his next assignment, 22 days after Dean Jones
Kishore Bhimani, the voice that relayed to the world that a Test had been tied in Madras, with the scores level of both the teams with all wickets down, only for the second time in cricket history, has passed on—just 22 days after the demise of the Australian star of that match, Dean Jones. “It’s…
Newspaper front pages on acquittal of Babri Masjid accused show how Indian media has been hollowed out of courage and conviction since 1992
When the domes of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya were brought down in 1992, the year after the liberalisation process began, there was great clarity in the news media and its consumers on the foundations on which the Republic of India stood. Blazing front-page editorials minced no words in denouncing the conspicuous destruction of the…
Indian media is in such fine fettle that the death of the great ‘Sunday Times’ editor Sir Harold Evans is just a routine affair
To no one’s surprise, the passing of Sir Harold Evans, the legendary Editor of The Times, London, received less-than-enthusiastic coverage in English newspapers in India, most of which were happy to run a dry Reuters or AP obituary on the foreign page. Only The Telegraph, Calcutta, in whose design in 1982 Sir Harry is rumoured…
Except ‘The Hindu’ and ‘The Telegraph’, most newspapers can’t join the dots between arrested journalist Rajeev Sharma and NSA Ajit Doval
The arrest of Delhi-based journalist Rajeev Sharma, for violating the Official Secrets Act (OSA) by allegedly passing on “defence secrets” to China, is remarkable for the consistent quality of stenography. Only The Hindu (above) categorically reports Sharma’s association with the right-wing thinktank Vivekananda International Foundation, whose founder-director was the national security adviser, Ajit Doval. ***…
A “big propaganda” campaign of “slander and vilification” driven by “malice and prejudice” which was “wrong and motivated”: ‘Deccan Herald’ holds the mirror to the media on Tablighi Jamaat
The coverage of the #TablighiJamaat congregation in Delhi—the shameless attempt to give the #Coronavirus outbreak a communal angle—was one of the more egregious examples of a majoritarian media that has lost its moral, social and professional moorings. India’s brain-dead TV “news” channels, of course, led the pack, with “shows” titled Corona Jihad se desh bachao (save India…
Mathai Manjooran: The Kerala newspaper Editor who refused to pay a Rs 100 fine and opted to be jailed for alleged contempt of court 61 years ago
On the day of reckoning for advocate Prashant Bhushan before the Supreme Court of India, The Telegraph has a fine story of an Editor in Kerala who refused to buckle in and opted to spend a month in jail for alleged contempt of court, 61 years ago. Mathai Manjooran was Editor of the Malayalam daily…
“Hold Facebook accountable. Misuse of social media a threat to democracy. Platforms must be agnostic to ideology”: newspaper editorials can’t hide weak reporting
Four days after The Wall Street Journal revealed Facebook’s chief India lobbyist Ankhi Das batting for BJP’s hate mongers, Indian newspapers are unable to add to a story that has deep implications for Indian society and polity. Also read: FB expose reveals barren cupboard ** Even today, there are no revelations and even today only…
Lead story in just 2 newspapers, and not one new insight in any: How the Facebook expose by WSJ also reveals Indian media’s barren cupboard
The August 14 expose in The Wall Street Journal of Facebook’s schmoozing with the BJP-led NDA government, by promoting hate speech for “business prospects”, has deep implications for Indian society, polity and democracy. Three days on, after the Independence Day holiday for some, the coverage of the issue in Indian newspapers is illustrative of their…
In the gushing waters of majoritarianism, there are only a handful of media outliers on the day after
“The book that begins with ‘We, the people of India’ is the God that we failed” “Raja and rishi are no longer” With a picture of the Constitution, and a white-on-black headline, ‘The Telegraph’ (above) says India witnessed a “ritual merger of the Church and State” in Ayodhya, at the ground-breaking ceremony on August 5.…
Kailash Budhwar, the former BBC Hindi and Tamil head, who played Aurangzeb and Salim
Amit Roy, The Telegraph‘s excellent London diarist has an obit of Kailash Budhwar in today’s paper. “Kailash Budhwar, who died in London on July 11, aged 88, was head of Hindi and Tamil at the BBC from 1979-1992, the first Indian to be appointed to the post. There was a big following in India for…
Vinod Dua tells the Supreme Court: “I have freedom of speech and I have the right to criticise the government. I don’t have to answer the police as to why I criticised the government”
Charged by Himachal Pradesh police with sedition for remarks made “against” prime minister Narendra Modi on a YouTube video, veteran broadcaster Vinod Dua tells the Supreme Court: “I have freedom of speech and have the right to criticise the government. Till date, the police have refused to give us details on the nature of the…
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