MxMIndia

Tag: The Times of India

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare on primetime news and in the papers

    Expect the same old, same old this Valentine Day

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Television is the favourite whipping boy of most media commentators and, for the most part, not only is it justified but it also great fun. (Is it also a coincidence that most media commentators have a print background?) But this Sunday’s newspapers were so dull that TV seemed to be a brutal relentless machine working its poor journalists to the bone with its constant hunger for more and more news and therefore deserving of much sympathy. I get five newspapers on a Sunday and finished the lot in an hour.

     

    Most Sunday papers run on a weekly cycle, which means there is ample time to plan and execute. But instead of fresh ideas and stories, we got the same old, same old. It is amply clear that the cutting of newsgathering resources and the desire to replace all talent with an army of sub-editors and, yes, boys and girls has led to a lack of imagination in newsrooms. Is there any point hoping that this is a temporary trend?

     

    Valentine’s Day, which is tomorrow, therefore threatens to bore us to tears as we read about real and manufactured love, as we did last year and the year before.

     

    We are constantly told in the media that we have to appeal to young audiences but I refuse to believe that every 20-year-old in the country is a dimwit who has no chance of recalling the same claptrap which was fed to him or her last year.

     

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    Can someone in The Times of India please get a promotion quick for wonderful stories to promote the boss’s daughter, so we can stop reading stories about Trishla Jain’s exhibition? The subject seems to have been stretched to the absolute limit.

     

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    TV and print seem to have taken quite opposing views on the army chief and his battle over his date of birth. TV was all for General VK Singh and put the government in the dock – and any studio guests who said otherwise were immediately put in the “unpatriotic” category.

     

    In newspapers however, commentators were more balanced and the dangers of the army chief’s actions were discussed. Now that the Supreme Court has rapped the army chief and the government on the knuckles, a more sober approach is being taken. Well, sort of – some sections of the media have now decided that the army chief must resign to protect his honour.

     

    This obsession with other people’s honour is a new media phenomenon andIndia’s star cricketers are its usual victims.

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare on primetime news and in the papers

    Making fun of Page 3 culture

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Have to say, I just love the new Hindu ads. Making fun of your competition is not just unexpected from India’s most sober newspaper but it is also rare in India. Are these ads a direct response to The Times of India’s Chennai campaign, where the ads alleged that the Hindu put people to sleep? Perhaps not, since the Hindu campaign seems all-India and directly accuses the Times of dumbing its readers down. There is nothing implied in the Hindu ad – we can clearly see that all the idiots being quizzed on their knowledge (or lack of it) claim to read The Times of India, bleeped out though the name may be.

     

    The print ads include one which says “we also have pages 1,2, 4, 6” and so on, a clear dig at The Times’s introduction of society and celebrity news on Page 3 of the Bombay Times many years ago. “Page 3” culture is now part of our lexicon and indeed Madhur Bhandarkar even made a film about it, almost as scathing as the Hindu’s ads. The funny thing is that we always have had a society-celebrity media, what Bombay Times did was to both magnify and expand it. The even funnier thing is that almost every other publication in the country was quick to copy the TOI. Even the Hindu, which may not have a celebrity circus page, was increased its light feature content.

     

    It’s also curious that DNA ran a very similar campaign to the Hindu’s recently – interviewing young people who knew nothing about anything except Bollywood and then it turns out that they only read DNA After Hrs! In DNA’s case, there was apparent pride in ignorance; Hindu mocks it.

     

    In these times, when the media itself has become the news, the Hindu ads – done by Ogilvy – are bound to get attention and approval. There are many who believe that trivialisation of the media is dangerous and that there is cynical marketing manipulation of our apparent obsession with Bollywood. The Press Council of India chairman Markandey Katju is probably nodding away happily, especially when he sees line like “Because government malfunctions matter more than wardrobe malfunctions” – another of the Hindu’s print ads.

     

    For my money however far worse than the trivialisation of newspapers is the fact that all celebrity news and gossip is actually fake – paid for by the stars, studios, sponsors and so on. The readers are fooled into believing that what they are reading is the result of some digging up by journalists – as it used to be in the old days, even film news. The truth of course is that it is handed to newspapers by public relations companies or by the marketing department to the editorial staff.

     

    Bad enough that we are trivial, we are also, it seems, foolish and exploited!

     

  • Ranjona Banerji reviews the content on news television and the morning papers

    Can we pay attention to what’s put out?

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    There was an intriguing contradiction in the way Indians abroad were carried in the news in the last week or so. While the murder of Anup Bidve of Pune in Manchester and the ill-treatment of Indian traders in China got an enormous amount of coverage, the annual government mela for our brothers and sisters who no longer live in India was not treated with the usual fanfare. Does that mean that Indians who suffer when in foreign lands are newsworthy but non-resident Indians who return to visit us are no longer so valuable? Since the India story is now located in India, is the media now yawning about NRIs? I have no answers, but I find this trend interesting.

     

    Meanwhile, our TV channels have taken their outrage about suffering Indians to new levels. US Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman has been subjected to some racial abuse in the US for his adopted children, who are apparently Chinese and Indian. This had our morning anchors foaming at the mouth. Also, according to the on-screen updates, US Hindus were also very angry. Is this a new category of people, US Hindus? Does it include people of non-Indian origins who might be Hindus? So why would Indonesians or Nepalis (for instance) be so angry about the anti-Huntsman ads? What about followers of the Iskcon movement in the United States? Are they US Hindus? Are US Christians, Buddhists, Muslims and Sikhs (who might be of Indian origin) not bothered? What about the Chinese (regardless of religion or regionality)? Or all people concerned about racism?

     

    It is a futile wish, but one still does occasionally hope that Indian TV channels paid a little more attention to what they put out.

     

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    As expected, Indian cricket has been under the scanner with all the accompanying hysteria. I understand that journalists have short memory spans but still, don’t they get bored of jumping from one extreme to the other whenever things go right or wrong. Sack the team, sack the board, worship the team (to be fair, almost no one says worship the board!), are the predictable mantras depending on performance. Then it’s an inevitable battle between oldies and youngies – strangely, whenever the selectors lean towards one or the other based on media and expert advice, there’s usually a disaster on the cricket field.

     

    Partly of course, the new belief (most prevalent in the new media) that India has to excel at everything it touches is to blame.

     

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    The travails of Anna Hazare’s movement against corruption continue. The Times of India on Saturday had a front page story about Shanti Bhushan’s duty evasions and on the edit page, there was Shanti Bhushan lecturing us about corruption! The Indian Express on Monday tells us that Anna Hazare’s followers and friends (of the pre-Jan Lokpal variety) have been redoubling their efforts to point out that India Against Corruption is “100 per cent pro-RSS”.

     

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    Mid-Day’ Mumbai edition carries a story about how the son of a former Mumbai police commissioner (RD Tyagi) has been accused of beating up customers to his beer bar and the Mumbai police have been slow in taking action. This misuse of power by the Mumbai police needs more exposure.

     

  • It's announcement time at LMG: Suresh Balakrishnan returns, Premjeet Sodhi to replace Sathya and Sudha Natrajan elevated

    Suresh Balakrishna to join LMG, Premjeet Sodhi likely to replace NP Sathyamurthy (who is joining Mudra)

    By A Correspondent

     

    Senior mediaperson and former chief operating officer of Mail Today, Suresh Balakrishnan is getting back to the Lintas Media Group fold. He is likely to be CEO of one of the agency’s arms and will report to LMG chairperson Lynn de Souza.

     

    Confirming the news to MxMIndia, Mr Balakrishnan said he’s looking forward to returning to LMG after a gap of nearly a decade.

     

    In his 25-plus year career, Mr Balakrishnan started his career in publishing with The Times of India group and spent a fair amount of media agency business at Initiative Media. After he quit Mail Today last year, he took a sabbatical and taught media management at the Symbiosis Institute of Mass Communications amongst others.

     

    Meanwhile, as reported by MxMIndia on December 15, N P Sathyamurthy is moving to Mudra. He is likely to be replaced by Premjeet Sodhi who is currently with LMG as president, The Collaborative. Yesterday, LMG also announced the elevation of Deputy CEO Sudha Natrajan to CEO of Lintas Initiative Media.

     

    Image courtesy: Stratagem Media

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare on primetime news and the morning papers

    Raking up Ramanujan

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    How intriguing that several weeks after other newspapers have debated the removal of AK Ramanujan’s essay on India’s many Ramayanas from the Delhi University history course, that The Times of India should not only pick up on it but give it front page treatment. Nothing new has happened on the issue this week and the article reads more like an overview rather than a news story. Many years ago when Mumbai was Bombay and TOI had very little competition in the city, the newspaper’s arrogance seemingly declared that something was not news till TOI carried it, sometimes a week after it happened.

     

    However, it is good that the Times has given so much coverage to the subject, which so far has been largely restricted to edit pages. Ramanujan’s essay upset the Hindutva brigade which pressured the university to drop it. The BVP also apparently targeted the prime minister’s daughter Upinder Singh since she was on the committee which picked the essay. Ramanujan’s academic credentials are impeccable and the essay has been there for four years. The politics of the protesters and those who gave in to them seems to have won the day and this is one more death knell for free thought in India. Now how about a TV discussion on this, with all our usual suspects?

     

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    NDTV’s Politically Incorrect between Mani Shankar Aiyar and Swapan Dasgupta had an interesting discussion on FDI in retail. In keeping with the programme’s format, Aiyar and Dasgupta batted for opposing sides. That is, Aiyar (Congress) was against FDI while Dasgupta (BJP) was for it. In some sense, that matches the positions which one would expect these two parties to take. It also demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain strict ideological positions in today’s politics – 20th century divisions are now passé and we need new definitions perhaps.

     

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    Meanwhile on Times Now, it is evident that even the great champion of Anna Hazare, Arnab Goswami, is getting a little tired of this anti-corruption movement’s obstinacy. As the discussion on the Lopkal bill went round and round, the viewer knows this much: Although Team Anna’s desire for an anti-corruption bill is commendable, this constant desire to go on hunger strikes when anyone disagrees with them is getting tiresome.

     

    Medha Patkar, an old hand at such movements, was actually quite honest when she admitted that stridency and supposed stubbornness is a well thought out strategy to keep the issue alive.

     

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    If you can catch the BBC documentary Secret Pakistan, please don’t miss it.

  • When our hysteria-obsessed TV channels realised that a natural calamity was more newsworthy than a man-made one

    Why democracy can so easily be an ‘obstacle’

    Four days of a severe throat infection meant little TV news and or newspapers. This I thought would save me from minute by minute updates on the condition of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s fast for amity or goodwill or whatever he called it. But as it turned out, I was wrong. The fast may have been covered but Modi’s condition was left out of it. So unlike with Anna Hazare, whose weight, blood pressure and such were reported in detail, we were given few clues on how much weight Modi had shed. Also, since the earthquake struck Sikkim on Sunday evening, even our hysteria-obsessed TV channels realised that a natural calamity was more newsworthy than a man-made one.

    Unfortunately, not only is our knowledge about the North-East of India decidedly dim, so is our television coverage as few channels have correspondents or camera crew stationed close by or even perhaps adequate arrangements with local channels. Thus we had to depend on telephone reports and as usual it is not till you get the next day’s paper that you really know what’s going on. Also given our India-obsession, our channels behaved as if the earthquake only affected Sikkim, pretty much ignoring the damage in neighbouring Nepal and Tibet. This is, one assumes, a form of patriotism.

    The damage which obsessive TV – with regard to the coverage of the Anna Hazare movement in particular — can do was brought home to me quite severely while addressing students of a media course at a Mumbai college on Saturday , when one wanted to know how we can get around an obstacle like democracy when it comes to reducing corruption!

    Changes made to the Board of Control for Cricket in India were examined threadbare on television and with many anchors palpably upset that there had been no public executions or floggings after India’s losses in England. It becomes clearer every minute you watch TV news why democracy can so easily be an “obstacle”.

     

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    Newspapers covered Modi’s fast as well but with far more scepticism, many choosing to concentrate on the fissures within both the BJP and the NDA. The Telegraph, Calcutta, has a story with Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United) making it clear than Modi was not a suitable prime ministerial candidate. Of course, all this jumping the gun a bit since the next general election is in 2014 and it is unlikely that Modi will be fasting all the way up to then, amity or no amity.

    Tuesday’s Hindustan Times underlined its scepticism of Modi’s amity fast with an editorial, a lead edit page piece by Sitaram Yechury as well as a column by its senior political analyst Vinod Sharma.

    The Times of India reduced Modi to a second edit, ‘Strange Sadbhavna’. The front page concentrated on its Social Impact Awards, to honour people who make India a better place. The Times of India has fine-tuned the knack of being all things to all people, greedy, socially conscientious, middle of the road and of course as with Times Now, decidedly rightwing.

    Also expectedly, newspapers concentrated on the devastation and death toll in all the quake-affected areas and not just on Indian casualties. Clearly, whatever the sure signs of degradation of standards in the Indian media, some of the better practices still manage to rise about the sludge.

    Most mainline daily choose to downplay or ignore US president Barack Obama’s plan to increase taxes to cut down the country’s budget deficit. The pink papers however could not. And weeks after Warren Buffett wrote an impassioned column in the New York Times on how he and his rich friends did not mind paying more tax, Indian papers picked up on it. Of course, this was because of a throwaway line in Obama’s speech – but since the speech was telecast live by all international and business channels, you could not escape it. Indian newspapers and channels seem to have one mantra down pat – never upset rich people. Obama apparently – and the New York Times for that matter – has no such qualms.

     

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    We need someone to explain our country’s nuclear policy to us cogently and intelligently as ever since the Japan tsunami there have been very real fears and very strong protests. Indian television goes overboard and Indian newspapers play it down. Help?!