Exactly six months ago, on the intervening night of June 15-16 this year, the lives of 20 Indian soldiers ended—literally at the hands of the Chinese in the heights of Ladakh. For several weeks, large sections of mainstream media were in denial, dishing out the sarkari view that there was nothing abnormal on the border.…
Tag Archives: The Tribune
The Piyush Goyal Theory of Journalism: the farther a newspaper is from New Delhi, the greater its chance of taking the pants off politicians*
Piyush Goyal‘s theory of Albert Einstein‘s theory of Isaac Newton‘s theory of gravity is a cute case study for headline management in Indian newspapers. The loud railway and commerce minister—who is a chartered accountant and BJP treasurer in touch with corporates—is widely known for his “phone calls”. The coverage in today’s papers of his faux pas reveals how…
Abuse, detention, pellet injuries, and an 80% drop in attendance at the media centre: is covering Kashmir becoming even more difficult for journalists?
Thirty-five days into Kashmir’s “lockdown”—mild jargon for a brutal, undemocratic suppression of fundamental rights in the State—are conditions getting even more tough for journalists to report from the Valley? The Telegraph, Calcutta, one of the few national newspapers giving adequate space for its Srinagar correspondent Muzaffar Raina to put out the unvarnished view, details the…
How a newspaper Editor inspired a spunky English mom to name her first son Ranga—the amazing life and times of possibly India’s first woman columnist, Freda Bedi
Who was the first woman to write a column, and a stridently feminist column at that, in a mainstream Indian newspaper? Unless there were others before her in the languages, could the answer be Freda Bedi, the mother of the actor Kabir Bedi, who wrote in The Tribune, Lahore, in pre-partition India? *** In his…
The humble home of the village school master who, at age 23, founded the Mahavishnu of Mount Road, ‘The Hindu’
The ‘Friday Review’ supplement of The Hindu carries, in its Bangalore edition at least, a feature on the little town of Tiruvaiyaru in Thanjavur district, where its founder G. Subramania Iyer was born and where he received his initial schooling. Mr Iyer, who started life as a school teacher, was 23 when he started The Hindu with…
Megaphone for Megalomaniac: How a high-school essay without one original thought made it to every edit page today
The demise of the editorial page as the voice and conscience of a newspaper is much lamented by the thinking class. But we in the journalism business have ourselves to blame for devaluing it by publishing tripe. On the eve of the unveiling of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel‘s statue, the prime minister’s office sent out a high-school…
A ‘mile-high experience’ for the hack-pack
A picture tweeted by the prime minister’s office (PMO) of the media scrum accompanying Manmohan Singh, as he answers questions in mid-air on his way back home after a five-day visit to the United States. Among those identifiable, Raj Chengappa, editor-in-chief of The Tribune, Chandigarh (in suit, ahead of mikes); Jayanta Ghosal of Ananda Bazaar…
Shalini Singh bags 2013 Prem Bhatia award
Shalini Singh, deputy editor of The Hindu and a former assistant editor with The Times of India, who did stellar reporting on the 2G spectrum and coal allocation scams afflicting the UPA government, has bagged the Prem Bhatia award for political reporting for 2013. S. Nihal Singh, chairman of the four-member jury that decided on…
Why the SC tried to frame media guidelines
What was behind the Supreme Court of India’s urge and urgency to frame guidelines for media coverage? The thinly veiled insinuations on the Chief Justice made by public interest litigants and dutifully carried by the media? The veteran journalist, columnist and author Kuldip Nayar givesa couple of conspiracy theories some oxygen, in The Tribune, Chandigarh:…
‘Darkest hour for media since the Emergency?’
Is it a good thing that the Supreme Court of India has not announced guidelines for media coverage of court cases? Or has it opened the floodgates by introducing a “neturalising device” that underlines the right of the accused to seek postponement of coverage on a case-by-case basis? And, by introducing a “constitutional principle” has…
The ‘sardar in the lightbulb’ signs out suddenly
Seventy years after he started needling readers and 42 years after he wrote his first column, the “sardar in the lightbulb” will shine no more. Khushwant Singh, the dirty old man of Indian journalism, says he is now too old (and maybe just a little less dirty) to dish out malice towards one and all…
Roasted almonds, biscuits & tea for gang of five
The prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, with the five newspaper editors he met for an interaction in New Delhi yesterday. Seated from left, clockwise, are the national security advisor Shiv Shankar Menon, Divya Marathi editor Kumar Ketkar, Nayi Duniya editor Alok Mehta, the PM’s media advisor Harish Khare, The Tribune editor Raj Chengappa, PTI…
A pre-Google ‘Bomb Mama’ of nuclear prolificity
The passing away of K. Subrahmanyam, the bureaucrat turned strategic affairs expert and journalist, at the age of 82 after a valiant battle with cancer, has provoked a flurry of warm tributes in newspapers. The former Economic Times editor Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, who brought “Subbu” into ET, recalls Subrahmanyam’s prolificity: “Many journalists have trouble…
Journalist’s house raided in 2G spectrum scam
Journalistic tongues in Delhi have wagged unabashedly after finding the voices of Vir Sanghvi, Barkha Dutt and Prabhu Chawla in the Niira Radia tapes in the 2G spectrum allocation scam, but the first big piece of action seems to have come from Tamil Nadu in the deep south. The residence of A. Kamaraj, the associate…
Whiff of a land scam at ‘National Media Centre’
Acquisition of land from farmers, tribals, shopkeepers and residents and others for industry and infrastructure projects has become a hot-button issue all over the country. Mediapersons, it seems, are not immune. The high-profile National Media Cooperative (NMC) housing society in Gurgaon—home to 190 of the capital’s boldfaced names in imprintlines—has landed bang in the centre…
‘The Tribune broke Liberhan story 5 months ago’
The “national” media in India—a loose moniker that alludes to Delhi-based newspapers, magazines and TV stations—are routinely accused of picking up stories from the regional language press and passing them off as “exclusives” when no one is watching. Fingers are now being pointed at the northern editions of The Indian Express which on November 23…
Don’t laugh: Do journos make good politicians?
PRITAM SENGUPTA in New Delhi and SHARANYA KANVILKAR in Bombay write: The stunning defeat of the BJP in the general elections has been dissected so many times and by so many since May 16 that there is little that has been left unsaid. What has been left unsaid is how the BJP’s defeat also marks…
Amita Malik, the ‘first lady of Indian media’, RIP
sans serif records with regret the passing away of Amita Malik, the radio journalist who grew to be one of India’s leading film and media critics, in New Delhi, on Friday. She was 86 years old. Often referred to as “the first lady of Indian media“, Ms Malik conducted path-breaking interviews with luminaries like Satyajit…
India’s first television news reader passes away
Doordarshan, the State-owned television channel in India, is reporting the death of Pratima Puri, the channel’s first news reader, when it went on air in 1959. Born Vidya Rawat, Puri belonged to a Gorkha family settled at Laal Paani in Simla, the capital of Himachal Pradesh, according to a report in The Tribune earlier this…
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