MxMIndia

Tag: Indrani Mukerjea

  • INX Media may be better known for the alleged involvement of P Chidambaram and his son Karti, but the company has been controversy-ridden ever since it was set up in 2007

    The Rise & Fall of INX Media

     

    By A Correspondent

     

    Former Home and Finance Minister P Chidambaram, one of the country’s top politicians, was arrested in a dramatic fashion on primetime television on Wednesday evening. The scaling of the entry wall and the camera crew chasing the CBI team to the back gate of the former minister’s home in New Delhi was riveting.

     

    Interestingly, it’s the affairs of a media company and the alleged involvement of Chidambaran and his son Karti that saw one of the most high profile and controversial arrests in recent years.

     

    Those from the media and entertainment trade would know that INX Media has seen several controversies even before it was set up.

     

    First the rise of Indrani Mukerjea. Her INX Services offered HR consulting to Star India when husband Peter was CEO. They married in 2002, and five years later set up INX Media and INX News. INX Media ran two channels – 9X, the general entertainment channel and 9XM, the music channel. News X was the news channel with senior journalist Vir Sanghvi as head.

     

    What led to the downfall of INX Media was the failure of the GEC 9X and the news channel being virtually a non-starter despite a state-of-the-art backend. As of to make matters worse for the duo, Viacom18 set up Colors and the GEC rose to the #1 position in less than a year. Rajesh Kamat, the CEO of the channel, worked with Peter Mukerjea at Star, more than a couple of levels junior.

     

    There was some indiscriminate spendings reported by the Mukerjeas, and finally, in 2009, on a day before Holi, the duo announced their exit. Soon, the news channel was sold, and the entertainment channel became part of the Zee network, and the music channel became an independent network managed by veteran mediaperson Pradeep Guha. The music network has been in discussions for a sale but with not much success. The Zee Network also pulled out of the stake buy.

     

    The controversy around Chidambaran and his son was around a case of money laundering with Indrani Mukerjea turning approver a few months back. The Mukerjeas are currently in jail… but that’s over a more personal matter.

     

    Those who know and have worked with Peter Mukerjea can’t believe that he could do any wrong and often blame wife Indrani for the misfortunes of INX Media.

     

    Misfortunes not just for the Mukerjeas, but also the Chidambarams.

     

     

  • Because it was not just the primetime debates but also the all-day broadcasts which have anchors, reporters, random guests and members of the general public all attributing motive as well as diagnosing the prime accused, writes Ranjona Banerji

    Ranjona Banerji: So how long news channels take to prove me wrong in my defence of their coverage of the Sheena Bora murder case?

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    So how long did it take for news channels to prove me wrong in my defence of their coverage of the Sheena Bora murder case? One day? Two days? I still vigorously defend the decision to cover the murder – surely one of the most intriguing and compelling in recent times – but the manner of coverage? O my sweet lord!

     

    I understand that many of us fancy ourselves as crime-solving detectives. And apparently a good number of us imagine ourselves to be psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists as well. Because it was not just the prime time debates but also the all-day broadcasts which have anchors, reporters, random guests and members of the general public all attributing motive as well as diagnosing the prime accused, Indrani Mukerjea.

     

    Television, sadly, is the worst culprit here. Again, it suffers because it puts its news-gathering process on camera. In a print or web journal, the reader does not know how you got your information and while this means that reporters do not become world famous in their neighbourhoods and their mummy-daddy’s friends, it also means that they do not become notorious. There were times, watching the coverage, when you felt you were in a movie about how bad the paparazzi and an intrusive media can be. This reporter from Times Now chasing after Sheena Bora’s boyfriend and or step-brother or step-nephew Rahul Mukerjea at Mumbai airport is the best example of how not to practise journalism. Or, at any rate, not to share it on air for viewers to be impressed with how low you can sink.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sinr35K4UJo

     

     

    Of course tabloid journalism exists and has a massive following. Let us not fool ourselves that the human race is only concerned with the philosophy of the Upanishads, Plato and Wittgenstein. Anyone who tells you that is a liar and not even a good one at that. The worst of human nature fascinates everyone. But speculation about why someone did what they did is not journalism. It’s drawing room conversation and water filer gossip. And it’s not good journalism, no matter how much it sells.

     

    However, thanks to the media we have found out more about the Mukerjeas, Boras, Khannas, Dases, Rais and their friends than we perhaps know about our own families. We have seen the lure of media fame entice friends, relatives, colleagues into sharing their tiny titbits of information and conjecture and for all we know, downright lies, about the Boras and Mukerjeas. Senior and not-so-senior journalists who worked with the Peter and Indrani Mukerjea have told us what they think of them and shared their experiences. We have also heard from every single person whom Sanjeev Khanna ever had a drink with at the CC&FC in Calcutta.

     

    I want to make it clear that there is no moral high ground here for any of us, especially the media which by its very nature trawls the garbage heaps of humankind. But there is a way of going about this which is not so downright foolish. Arnab Goswami’s nightly courts border on the hilarious, if only because they have become caricatures of themselves. NewsX has been rivalling Times Now with its judgmental hysterics. These so-called high society grande dames, with enough skeletons in their own closets to rattle a few medical college storerooms, sitting on judgment in TV studios is another farce. To me in fact it exposes journalism’s biggest downfall – to have insufficient background information on your sources or public faces. The psychiatrists and psychologists who are happy to come on TV to diagnose the accused, without ever having met them, is nothing but outright publicity-seeking. This includes former police officers, some of whom had terrible track records when in office. These high-powered members of the public showcase themselves as desperate publicity seekers – and not so different from those they seek to condemn.

     

    Newspapers meanwhile have moved on and the Sheena Bora case no longer dominates the front pages. My one beef here (if I am still allowed to use that word) is with the Times of India’s Dehradun edition which did not think the good people of North India needed anything but cursory information about the horrifying assassination of Kannada scholar and writer MM Kalburgi. That is criminal stereotyping of your readership, especially when the news of his death is all over news channels.