Tag: freaking news

By Ranjona Banerji

The Outlook Group has had to shut down three magazines, all of which were foreign franchises – People, Marie Claire and Geo. Any profit-making organisation is well within its rights to close down a business which is doing badly. But media houses seem to be severely short of any kind of human relations with their employees. Inevitably, employees are told at the last minute and shunted out immediately. We have seen it recently with Mid-Day closing down centres in Delhi and Bangalore and with NDTV Profit in Mumbai. The callousness can usually be attributed to managements or the corporate side of the journalism business.

In the case of the three Outlook Group magazines, most editorial employees apparently found through a tweet by a writer not connected to the group. It also appears that the management sections of the magazines had been given prior warning. There is something disquieting – apart from distressing for those concerned – in the cavalier way in which media managements treat editorial staff. This trend has remained unchanged even though Admin and Personnel departments now have fancy names like “Human resources”. As anyone who has interacted with them will vouch for, there is little that is human about them.

A labour court in Bandra has stayed the termination of services of 17 editorial staff of People magazine. The writer who revealed the closures on Twitter has written an article for newslaundry.com explaining her case and the attitude of the management. http://www.newslaundry.com/2013/07/a-bleak-outlook/ In this, Rajyasree Sen raises some pertinent points. One which stands out is the silence on the matter by Krishna Prasad, editor of the group’s flagship magazine, Outlook. Prasad has a very successful blog called churumuri, which often comments on media matters. It has been harsh – and rightly so – on the sacking of senior editorial staff of Forbes magazine. Sen questions churumuri’s silence when it comes to Outlook’s treatment of its staff in his blog: http://churumuri.wordpress.com/. I could not find any references to this issue on churumuri either.

The problem however is obvious and it is also why journalists rarely come together in unity for causes any more. There are innumerable clichés I could use but they all boil down to one thing: money. No one is going a rock a boat that they’re perched on. As long as the salary lands in your bank account every month, it is better to remain silent about management behaviour and transgressions. I do not know how much clout editors have with their owners and senior managers any more. Earlier, there were some signs of support, of editors fighting for their staff or showing solidarity. Now solidarity within the profession seems to be in short supply. More than three years outside a newspaper organisation has taught me this much: journalism is now a cut-throat dog-eat-dog business. Perhaps if any of us were the editor of Outlook (!), we would also be silent on this matter no matter how much venom we poured on other media groups for their misbehaviour! But the corollary is that if you cannot bite the hand that feeds you, can you be considered fair when you criticise other media groups?

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The Times of India sometimes manages to surprise even hardened cynics. Because of a little storm on Twitter, India’s largest read English newspaper has been exposed for carrying the most unprintable bilge on its website. Under its lifestyle section, masquerading as gender relations, the website has been carrying a series of articles about how to have sex, positions women like and so on.

They appeared to have been written by the same person and are not only badly written and in bad taste but also have little journalistic reason for being there. It is like a monkey trying to imitate the Cosmopolitan style of 57 ways to suck your man’s toes and so on. If you found the Cosmo articles silly, you cannot imagine how the TOI website versions would upset you. I have to use the past tense because the articles have been removed from the website after the criticism. It makes you wonder if there had been no editorial control so far on what this young person had been writing. I am loath to name him or her but the name is doing the rounds on the social media. It is also evident that whoever wrote these appeared not just to be misogynistic (women do not bathe often and are smelly are two popular themes) but also not very experienced in sexual matters.

This comment on the TOI website by Huffington Post encapsulates the disgust and scorn that has been apparent on social media for the last couple of days: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/07/30/times-of-india-women-facts_n_3677378.html? utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false&utm_content=buffer266a7&utm_source= buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

Without being moralistic about it, why should a reputed newspaper’s website have to resort this kind of bordering-on-bad-porn writing? The articles had no corroborations or quotes or access to surveys. They were not funny or even sexy. The writer appeared to have no qualifications to hold forth on the ‘5 sex positions that women die for’. It was like someone senior said, “Let’s have some writing on sex” and someone junior was put on the job.

I have been told that most newspapers have similar kinds of “stories” on their websites. True?

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator based in Mumbai. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. She can be reached via Twitter at @ranjona. The views here are her own

By Ranjona Banerji

The sheer childishness of Indian television news hits you like a gale force wind when you switch on after a break. This phenomenon is compounded by the fact that my newspaper vendor appears to be sulking with me! I have been surfing through all the news channels at our disposal and am hard-pressed to find one that I can stick with.

The most amusing I could find was – nothing new here – Times Now. The little headlines for their poll on the next general elections (Jayalalitha juggernaut, Jagan blockbuster debut and so on) are reminiscent of the work of newspaper subs from the 1980s who have had to come up with a barrage of headlines while working on a special issue close to deadline. Anything goes. Of course, what was fun in the 1980s is just some fuddy-duddy stuff in 2013.

The time warp that Indian TV is lost in however just relates to the written matter. No Wren and Martin or any other grammar books may be in evidence but the writing is arcane. But when it comes to the representation of news, then the sheer inanity of what is on offer is pure 21^st century India. Skims the surface, minus depth and just careens from one hysterical breathless breaking bit of nothing to another.

How about a comparison with the British TV coverage of the birth of the royal baby? They took a fairly trivial if engaging event and attempted to give it gravitas, sometimes with hilarious consequences. We take grave events and then try to make them as trivial as possible. It is an art which is quite commendable, if you look at it minus bias.

The very strange personal squabble between two (great?) economists Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati is a good example. Usually, such worthies would have quarrelled in some inaccessible scholarly journal in suitably erudite jargon (one hopes…). Instead, they took each other on in the mainstream media and even more incredibly in the broadcast media. So you had Bhagwati saying that he had done everything first long before Sen, then you had Sen saying he was hurt by the personal attacks people made on him. This spilled over in their newspaper writings and interviews. The result was that their scholarly stars dimmed and their economic theories remained opaque. It is a worthy knack of the media to take intelligent academics and make them sound like gibbering fools.

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Trying to understand the news through the social media is even funnier than television, it has to be admitted. Social media operates between derision and outrage which means that all events get skewed and it is impossible to make sense of anything. Yet, for all that, social media is an excellent aggregator of news and you can browse through a vast variety of articles and opinions from across the world which may not have otherwise come your way.

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The fight in the media as far as the next Indian general elections are concerned has been between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi. But one might suggest that the Indian electorate is given to complexity in its reactions and this simple two-horse race might just be a chimera that entertains but amounts to little more than a distraction from more substantial issues. (If I was a 21^st century person, I would have used the erroneous substantive here and got away with it! Alas…)

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Is it just me or do other people reach for the remote when news channels try to give us “positive” news? I knew it. Just me.

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator based in Mumbai. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. She can be reached via Twitter at @ranjona. The views here are her own

By Ranjona Banerji

The big media sensation in India these days is definitely Narendra Modi. Ever since he was made the chairman of the BJP’s election committee – seen as heir presumptive of his party – if the Gujarat chief minister so much as sneezes, it’s time for a political debate on TV and a dissection of the symbolism of a sneeze on opinion-based websites.

Modi himself – or his publicity machinery – adds fuel to the fire. One day, he is supposed to have almost single-handedly rescued 15,000 Gujaratis from the floods of Uttarakhand, soon after he claims to have felt as bad as a person sitting in a car which runs over the son (or daughter) of a dog – an elliptical reference to the victims of the Gujarat riots. This interview to Reuters spread like wildfire across social media and what is now called mainstream media (acronymed to MSM which does sound like some disease you don’t particularly want). The words used by Modi were translated as “puppy” and the merry-go-round started again.

Two things are clear from this. One, Modi’s publicity machine is trying too hard. And, two, the media’s focused attention is a double-edged sword, as Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and the organisers of the anti-corruption movement found out to their horror. Modi now cannot take a step without someone watching, someone tearing it apart and someone else explaining what he meant in excruciating detail.

Tied to the Modi-in-the-media story is that of the intelligence agencies, people killed in fake encounters and the Gujarat government. The death of Mumbai teenager Ishrat Jahan in 2004 has now overshadowed that of her companions and also exposed a divide in India’s various investigative and intelligence agencies. The media, rather than look at the issues involved objectively, has sided with one or the other investigative agency.

The problem here is a little different from the “for or against” Modi camps in the media. For years, editors have allowed reporters working on intelligence and police beats to become mouthpieces for those agencies. The logic is that you pick up on inside stories and the senior edit team works out the kinks caused by bias. But life and a newsroom never work that way and the result is that print journals and to some extent news channels just become conduits for intelligence agency politics. Print prides itself on having more filters than TV but as the various headlines, allegations, fights and quite frankly bogus information masquerading as news has shown recently, the filters have been playing hookie.

I must make my own bias clear here: I lived in Gujarat before and during the 2002 riots. There is little doubt in my mind about state government complicity, whether active or passive. However, that does not mean that everything that happens in Gujarat has to be vilified. It cannot be a “for us or against us” case for the media at least. Modi is a chief minister with a sordid past. But he’s just a chief minister of one state. He is not a superhuman being sent either to destroy or redeem us. Myth-making is a long organic process. It is unlikely that a media with chronic short-term memory loss can be successful at it.

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In the rest of the world, news has had a sort of similar focus. The US has been concerned with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin last year. Zimmerman shot the teenager assuming him to be hostile while on his rounds as part of a neighbourhood watch scheme. Martin, 17, has no weapon on him and his two biggest crimes appeared to be wearing a hoodie and being black.

As the US grapples with the consequences of this verdict, Britain where I am now, is waiting for the arrival of the “royal baby”. The “due date” (last Saturday) has come and gone and the breathless media has to concentrate on this event. Babies as we all know can be tremendously uncooperative in such matters. But the stories must continue. A special reclining chair for daddy in the hospital suite, also champagne and luxury toiletries, father William playing polo, mummy Kate “putting her feet up” at her parents, the sun shining, no clouds, step-mother letting slip the new due date might be this weekend and other such trivialities occupy the national press.

Who says the media is different anywhere else?

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator based in Mumbai. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. She can be reached via Twitter at @ranjona. The views here are her own

By Ranjona Banerji

International Women’s Day is upon us once again and as ever females are meant to be fooled into thinking that this day – March 8 – is about us. We are so lucky – governments have come up with special schemes for us, newspapers and now television are full of inspiring stories about women who have done extraordinary things and so many advertisements telling us that today is the right day to buy diamonds. I suspect that tomorrow is also the right day to buy diamonds as far as the diamond seller is concerned but for the rest, tomorrow we can get back to business as usual and put the inspiring women stories which could not be used into the folder for next year.

Do I sound nasty and bitter? The short answer: yes. This tokenism and these sweet little gestures around March 8 began to ring hollow quite a few years ago. I am grateful at least that this year no newspaper that I read has done the most token nod of all to women’s day: pulled a number of females out of features or wherever, patronisingly patted them on the head and made them editors for the day. On March 8 itself, they would have climbed down into their usual roles and write inspiring stories about how to suck a man’s toes in 16 different ways.

The gangrape in New Delhi on December 16, 2012 revealed to us just how shockingly patriarchal and anti-women our society was. In those days, I must concede, the media did a splendid job in focusing on women, women’s rights and the underlying prejudices in India. This year’s Women’s Day had plenty of scope to take that narrative further. Instead, the only piece I found worth reading was Mrinal Pande in The Indian Express trying to kill the myth of feminists and bra-burning.

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There are a couple of things the media could do within to redress gender discrimination – starting with their newsrooms. Stop restricting women to features and women’s sections. And remove that glass ceiling that exists in many – though not all – newsrooms. I myself have benefitted from gender equality in some though not all jobs but there’s a long way to go, baby. How many women editors-in-chief do we have in Indian newspapers? All right, next question! News channels, it must be admitted, have done better than newspapers in India.

The other immediate task for the media should be to introduce workable and sensible sexual harassment laws in the work place and provide a suitable climate for people to complain, be heard and not be discriminated against later. While pointing fingers at everyone else’s shortcomings is an essential journalistic principle, a few penetrating glances at the media’s own misdemeanours would not come amiss.

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Having said all that, here’s this. In just under 30 years of working in the media in India, the worst sexual discrimination I have experienced or seen was a World Association of Newspapers conference in Vienna in the 1990s. The theme was how editors and marketers could and could not work together. Raju Ramchandani was the publisher of Sunday Mid-day and I was editing Sunday Mid-Day at the time so we were sent as a marketer-editor team. Of the 150-odd delegates, over 95 per cent were white men from European newspapers. Raju and I were the only females in senior marketing and editorial positions. Most of the men initially treated us with great scepticism as if there is no way we could have achieved these posts through non-nefarious means. The only other women there were a senior PR person, a female reporter who had accompanied her male editor and a secretary.

I could add that there were also about six people of “colour”, apart from us, two men from Hong Kong and two men from Africa. The media as far as WAN representatives were concerned was evidently the domain of the White Man. Have things changed? I would be interested to know.

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Prasoon Joshi of McCann Erickson has clearly told us that advertising cannot do anything but reflect what’s in society so no change can be expected from them, regardless of how many poems he writes or how much he weeps about the plight of women on public platforms. At least Josy Paul of BBDO has taken the bit within his teeth and his agency has come up with the “Soldiers for Women” campaign for Gillette.

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So buy your diamonds, give your mother a call (though you could do that on Mother’s Day if you like), get some pink life insurance and enjoy the pap movies that will be shown on TV.

By Ranjona Banerji

Editorialising is a strange word. It, in effect, is a bad thing. Yet a newspaper must have editorials and an editorial page, where the newspaper’s stand on issues and considered opinions find a space. It is the core, the heart of a newspaper if you will. But when a reporter shifts away from the facts to deliver a judgment you have the taboo of editorialising. In most newspapers, there is a host of checks of balances, starting from the junior-most sub-editor who can stop a reporter from straying (and still mistakes can get through). But what happens in a TV channel?

The short answer is: I don’t know. TV news in India is a beast which operates by a different set of rules. One reads in Caravan that Times Now does not bother to fact check or grammar check or anything check its running news updates which scrawl across the screen in case it misses out on “breaking” news. Can this be true? Empirical evidence suggests that in most news channels in India the common mantra seems to be: run first, check later.

The reason for this diatribe is a curious set of running scrolls which I read on Times Now very late on Sunday night. India had lost the Davis Cup tie against Korea 1-4. To anyone who follows tennis, India’s top players and the All India Tennis Association have been locked in a fight for a year now and 11 players refused to play Davis Cup unless their demands were met. In this stand- off, India fielded who they could. Only a miracle could have saved India from loss and that miracle was not forthcoming. No surprises here to anyone who follows tennis or even sport.

But Times Now ran a series of what I can call judgments or opinions: Players party after humiliating loss; What is there to celebrate?; Players celebrate Davis Cup loss and so on.

Since then, I have unsuccessfully looked for the story to corroborate these news bites. I can myself think of a number of reasons why the players had a party, if indeed they did (as should anyone who has ever needed to drown a few sorrows!). I can understand that everyone on Times Now wants to be Arnab Goswami and thunder on about what the nation wants to know. But if Times Now wants to retain its 9 pm weeknight ascendancy, it needs to curb the enthusiasm of its other staff and allow Goswami’s the exclusive right to be India’s prime conscience-keeper.

And editorialising needs to remain what it is: a bad word in the wrong hands.

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There is a distressing age-ism in newsrooms where anyone over the age of 45 finds it increasingly difficult to get employment. I understand the current obsession with youth but it is also evident that all newsrooms suffer from lack of experience at various levels. The loss of institutional memory, informed opinion and superior judgment will be felt sooner than later and by that time, the current generation will have grown up on half-baked knowledge and the younger workforce will have lost out on the basics. This will be sad but unfortunately seems inevitable.

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Many serious media commentators are disturbed by the lack of social diversity in newsrooms and are blaming this for the outright casteist and illiberal attitudes of media outlets in general. Any views on this?

By Ranjona Banerji

“Well Mr Arnab Goswami, now I know why they say you’re a dangerous man,” said actor-superstar Kamal Haasan to Mr India-Wants-to-Know on Times Now on Thursday night. India’s most celebrated TV anchor (NDTV’s Barkha Dutt was ousted from that position a while ago, regardless of what Hillary Clinton may believe) demurred shyly at the charge, honoured though he may have been. However, in spite of all Goswami’s promptings, Haasan maintained that he would leave the country if pushed in the future and the secular nature of society was threatened.

Haasan in fact mentioned two things which are at the forefront of discussion in India – in roundabout ways – neither of which Goswami picked up on. The first was that all this happened to Haasan on Mahatma Gandhi’s death anniversary. And the second was that the demolition of the Babri Masjid did more damage to us than we have fully understood.

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The arrest of former Madhu Koda aide Anil Bastawade (for some reason Times Now reporters also insist on using his middle name which is Adinath) has excited Times Now more than anyone else. The mining scam under the former Jharkhand chief minister is estimated to cover about RS 4000 crore (also according to Times Now) but one cannot determine how far Bastawade’s involvement goes – somewhere near Rs 250 crore which seems a little meagre for so much excitement.

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Karan Thapar’s Last Word on CNN-IBN discussed freedom of speech and the capitulation by governments to threats from fringe groups in view of recent events. The problem was that Thapar and three guests all had the same viewpoint – that the Tamil Nadu government had infringed on freedom of expression with its ban of Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam. The only man who disagreed with Kumar Ketkar, editor of Divya Marathi, Aryaman Sundaram, lawyer and Najeeb Jung, vice-chancellor of Jamia Milia, was AN Krishnan, advocate general, Tamil Nadu. Krishnan kept referring to TN CM as “Amma” which sounded even more incongruous than his arguments about a possible law and order situation if the film was released.

This makes for a non-argument since Krishnan was the only opponent. And while Thapar’s show is one of the few on Indian television where guests behave themselves, a discussion requires various points of view.

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The Lokpal bill was threatening to overtake television again – or so I gathered from Twitter and a reasonable discussion on Rajya Sabha TV. Friday morning’s newspapers as usual took a wider view of life. But they were depressing in their own was as they were full of molestation of teenage girls, upper caste murders of Dalits in Maharashtra and rapes…

CNN-IBN by the way has to be commended on its coverage of the murder of three Dalit youths in Maharashtra over a love affair with a Maratha girl. We clearly need to be reminded over and over again of our low and base nature and how outdated traditions continue to cause more harm than good.

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This is just an observation but Firstpost, the news and views website of TV18, which was well-received when it started and has become very popular, has now started to pick up a fair amount of flak on social media. I am not sure whether this is because of its somewhat waffling political opinions or the ill-considered comments on Shah Rukh Khan by my former colleague Venky Vembu or the natural attrition which follows popularity… A reality check is perhaps in order?

By Ranjona Banerji

The TV anchor in India is now looking to compete with astrologers. Would not call them soothsayers or forecasters – because those words imply wisdom – but certainly they are always trying to look into the future to predict various outcomes that may suit their channels. The news is not always about the news on TV. It is about looking into your little crystal ball and trying to understand what the news means. Sometimes it’s about asking other people what the news means.

Should Pakistan apologise to India? Why won’t Pakistan apologise to India? Why doesn’t India do more against Pakistan? Should Sushil Kumar Shinde apologise to the RSS? And the biggest question of all, how will Rahul Gandhi run the Congress, will Rahul Gandhi run the Congress, should Rahul Gandhi run the Congress, why should Rahul Gandhi run the Congress, if he does, what will he do, if he doesn’t what will he do…

There is little sense that the TV anchors have any clue what the answers to these questions are: perhaps I am being insulting to astrologers. TV anchors just look into the future and ask questions. Sometimes the guests they invite to their studios try to answer these questions but they cannot always manage because of the loud noises, constant chatter and the usual atmospheric disturbances.

So Arnab Goswami has a regular fit over Rahul Gandhi’s ascendancy speech and all the questions he can generate over it, Karan Thapar answers his own questions as sociologist Dipankar Gupta informs him and Sidharth Vardarajan of the Hindu thinks we should wait and see what Rahul Gandhi does.

Varadarajan is making an impossible suggestion as far as television in India is concerned. We just cannot wait. We must have the answers now. The nation wants to know.
The nation in the meantime may be grappling with any number of problems other than the exact nature of Rahul Gandhi’s dreams and nightmares. For that, you have to read a newspaper, any newspaper. In case you are interested in Rahul Gandhi, here are three experts (two are ex-colleagues I confess) for you.

Sidharth Bhatia in Hindustan Times: http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/ColumnsOthers/A-work-in-progress/Article1-997828.aspx

Arati Jerath in The Times of India: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/paint-it-black/entry/long_road_ahead

And Suhas Palshukar in The Indian Express: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/late-to-the-party/1062886/

These are more analysis and informed opinion than reading auras and grabbing at straws in the wind so be warned in advance. That’s not a prediction, it’s just an advisory!

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Mumbai’s newspapers continue to be a depressing litany of crimes against women and police insensitivity. One has to commend the media for continuing with this story that could so easily get lost in the quick turnover of news. Instead we see reporters and editors continuing with their focus on women and how they are treated in India. Kudos.

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Last week, I attended a workshop, organised by Population First (which also runs the Laadli Media Awards for gender sensitivity and IPAS) on how pre-birth gender selection practices are affecting regular abortions in India and the consequent ill-effects on women’s reproductive rights and health. NGOs and activists across the board were extremely appreciative of the support they had got from the media when it came to the horrors of gender selection. The battle, they said, could not have been fought without the media. Bouquets therefore once again for the media and a well-deserved pat on the back.

The writer is a senior journalist and commentator. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. The views expressed here are her own

Dear Sirs and Madams

This is an earnest plea from the tennis lovers of India. While we appreciate all the good intentions with which your channel Star Sports buys the rights to tennis tournaments, we feel that this intention gets slightly dented when you do not actually show the said tournaments. Let’s look at the ongoing Australian Open, one of the four biggest tennis tournaments of the year. I add that descriptive because it is not immediately clear that everyone in your organization knows that.

On the night of January 20, a Sunday, World number 1 Novak Djokovic and Stanislas Wawrinka were locked in what many experts are calling the match of the tournament. To begin with, Star Sports did not show the match from the beginning. When it got into it two sets and an hour and a half later, hopes of tennis fans were lifted that at last they would be able to watch this compelling match on their television sets. Alas. As the two players were evenly matched at 10-9 on serve in the fifth and final set, the clock turned to 8 pm and the television screen turned to hockey. That’s it. Djokovic is mid-serve and the telecast stops. No explanation, nothing.

For those of us of a certain age this smacks of those strange days in the 1970s and 1980s when the only television in India was provided by the Government of India and there was only one channel. Doordarshan had this incredible ability of buying the rights to Wimbledon (another major tennis tournament, the oldest and most prestigious in the world, just for your information), and suddenly stopping mid-telecast for the news or for a collection of Hindi film songs.

Some of us foolishly thought that life would be different after privatization and the plethora of TV channels that India is now blessed with. But for the past few years with Star Sports, our experience as tennis fans has been quite a blast from the past.

I only use the Djokovic (world number 1, made $12 million in prize money alone last year I believe) and Wawrinka match as an example. Two days before that, it was Roger Federer and Bernard Tomic who got the same treatment from Star Sports. It could be that no one in your channel has heard of Federer so perhaps I might explain. He is considered by many to be the greatest player of all time. He is the most successful male player ever with 17 grand slam titles. He is also in the top 5 of the highest earning sports persons in the world. He has innumerable fans across the world, more than half of whom live in India, incidentally, according to his managers.

This tennis match with Tomic which I mention was also billed as a big contest (the Djokovic-Wawrinka thriller was a surprise, I’ll grant you that). Tomic is an astounding young talent from Australia, which once produced some of the world’s greatest tennis players – Rod Laver, Margaret Court, Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson, Evonne Goolagong to name only a few. He is also a brash young man with great game and lots of chutzpah. Would he manage to teach a lesson to the Great Man or would Federer swat him like a fly? Of course, only those Indians with access to the internet can answer that question because Star Sports did not show the match. At all.

Earlier in this tournament, the Australian Open matches were switched to ESPN. Thank you for that. But that was just once. Maybe they sometimes switch to your HD channels. The problem is that not all of us have access to HD channels. Perhaps some of us cannot justify the extra expense that the DTH/cable provider demands. In my own case, for instance, the cable operator I use does not have the HD channels within his grasp.

I have mentioned the money earned by tennis players only because I crassly assume that there is some commercial consideration in the way tennis is treated by your channel. It could be that the advertisements from Rolex, Thai Airways, Cadbury’s, Micromax and the others are insufficient. My commiserations.

I would therefore request your channel to please stop buying the rights to tennis tournaments if you are not interested in showing them properly. All of us tennis fans in India know that we cannot compete with cricket. So when you buy the rights to a cricket tournament, please don’t strain your budget by buying a tennis tournament as well. All of us in India are sympathetic with the struggle to give hockey its prominence. So when you are committed to the cause of hockey (in between cricket) please do not buy a tennis tournament.

You may feel that we tennis fans should be pleased with a bit of tennis now and then. But you are mistaken. We want it all. And if you can’t give us that, you could allow your competitors a chance to bid for these tennis tournaments. They are more committed to tennis anyway. (Or maybe, they just don’t have the same cricket rights!)

And as a post-script: in this world of social media, please do allow your persons (or bots) who handle your twitter account (@espnstar) to answer questions and respond to fans.

Yours sincerely

Ranjona Banerji, a tennis fan

The writer is a senior journalist and commentator. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. The views expressed here are her own

By Ranjona Banerji

The apparent war-mongering by our TV news channels has been tamped down for the moment but that doesn’t mean that it is any less dangerous or that it should be forgotten. The media has to reflect public opinion not manipulate it. A provocative media is fine as far as it goes but a media which goes overboard into hysteria about every single subject is about the little boy who cried wolf once too often.

(This edit from the Hindu makes clear the perils of playing “war war” because you can’t find anything better to entertain yourself with: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/stop-baying-for-blood/article4310116.ece)

Therefore, having “solved” the problem with Pakistan, TV now shifted its focus to the diesel price hike introduced by the government. For hours on the Newshour debate on Times Now, the issue was discussed. Populism, sops, subsidies and fiscal deficits were some of the words thrown around but with the anchor batting for different sides at every half hour (it was a very long programme), the viewer can be forgiven for turning into a quivering mess of protoplasm at the end of it. Arnab Goswami was sometimes for helping the fiscal deficit along, sometimes he was batting for the middle class, sometimes he was for sops for the poor, sometimes he was calling political parties out for their hypocrisy… who knows at the end what that diesel price policy means (actually I know: read a newspaper, any newspaper).

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But why blame Indian TV all the time, eh? It was interesting to see just how long the BBC World Service in India took to report on the helicopter crash in central London on Wednesday morning. They were stuck on the euro for about 45 minutes – by which time CNN and Al-Jazeera both had it – until they got to the story. And when they did, they only had mobile phone footage of the crash.

Even more interesting was the amount of support they had on Twitter. When I made a couple of jokes about the delay by the BBC, several people sent me links to the BBC website to tell me that they had the news there first.

The web then as we all know is the biggest threat to all other idea and the sooner the fuddy-duddies figure that out the better for them.

**

The death of former veejay Sophiya Haque got plenty of play in Friday’s newspapers. Haque was very popular on TV once amongst the MTV-watching crowd but has not been seen in India for almost a decade. Was the coverage given to her sudden death from cancer a result of the sentimental nature of some editors or because there’s a new generation of editors who can’t be older than their mid-40s, for whom Haque was an important part of their growing up years?

**

I have a request from the people of Ranchi for sports journalists: while you’re covering the One Day International between India and England, please also spare a few column centimetres for the ongoing hockey league (which has a Ranchi team apparently) and is being ignored because of the cricket.

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator based in Mumbai. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. The views here are her own

By Ranjona Banerji

Back in Mumbai after six weeks, I suddenly have to get used to reading newspapers early in the morning. On the outskirts of Dehra Dun where I have been, the newspapers don’t arrive till around noon. Often they are “dak” editions and this means that some of the news is more than a day old. In the days of 24-hour television news and the internet, it is difficult to justify this kind of arrogance for “mufussil” areas on the part of newspapers any more. One understands the difficulties of printing and travel but some thinking and perhaps use of technology needs to be done.

Meanwhile, I find myself missing the appropriately named Garhwal Post and the somewhat strangely named Himachal Times for a local Uttarakhand newspaper. The Post is a tabloid and it takes the business of newspapering very seriously. In its 18 to 20 pages, it manages to fit in serious national news, editorials, columns, local news, international news, entertainment, features and sports. In fact, it is a potted version of a larger newspaper and you really don’t feel like you’re missing out on much. The editorials are not always local either but present an excellent world view. The columns also deal with local and larger issues and very popular is the “tips” section where you learn that soaked nigella seeds help with indigestion and stuff like that.

The Himachal Times on the other hand prides itself on the small stories – “Car parked on Rajpur Road for three hours creates panic”. English is often conspicuous in its absence, making sometimes for a very enjoyable read.

The Times of India and Hindustan Times also have Doon supplements which are soft-feature driven and the TOI supplement at least comes from the Response editorial department. Production qualities are better but I would read the Garhwal Post over either of them anyday! The Hindu sends the Jaipur edition to Dehra Dun so you learn all about Jaipur.

Amar Ujala used to be the top Hindi newspaper but with the arrival of Dainik Jagran, everyone else seems to have been shaken up a bit. Hindustan has some mentions, especially for its entertainment section which one supposes is the power of Bollywood.

**

Here in Mumbai, it is business as usual. The Times of India goes blanket, the Hindustan Times gives you focus, Mid-Day looks at the city and Indian Express has its own spin. I have still not felt the need to exchange The Economic Times for Mumbai Mirror so all I know is that Pooja Bhatt is very angry with Mirror, via Twitter!

**

But the difference between Times Now and The Times of India over the current border tension is intriguing. It has been commented on before but it remains a subject of discussion. There’s the “Aman ki Asha” Times of India campaign running for a couple of years now and there’s the extremely provocative stance taken by Times Now and Arnab Goswami. The cynic tells us that this is part of some Bennett Coleman conspiracy to cover every angle, but I wonder.

It would be interesting to know however whether our news channels really think it is necessary for India and Pakistan to go to war over cross-border skirmishes. The sort of patriotic hysteria being drummed up every night itself borders on irresponsibility. You read the newspapers and you get news. But you watch television and you get a constant barrage of petulant questions seeking some sort of public apologies and declarations from both sides. The world is not yet, I reckon, run from TV studios.

**

Without taking away from the pain of a brutal death, I am slightly squeamish about calling every soldier who has been killed a “martyr”. The horror of having an army with soldiers is that death is written into the employment contract. A martyr has a very specific definition of someone who has sacrificed himself for a greater cause. Harsh as it may sound, we pay members of the armed forces money to die on our behalf. There is a difference and sentimentality cannot change that.

Conversely however, it is heartening that the death of a jawan is causing so much pain since foot soldiers are usually forgotten in the battles of fat cat generals and the use of such unsightly terms like “friendly fire” and “collateral damage”.

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. The views here are her own