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No money in Manipur
• Date published: April 1, 2008
Did you know one plus one can make zero?
You didn't, you say?
OK, take these two gospel truths:
i) The Northeast does not quite make news in the Indian mainstream media
ii) Media owners are loathe to disseminate news items about journalists through their outlets.
Now take an incident which has these two incontrovertible truths as the background: the offices of many newspapers in Manipur and the state's only television channel were shut down on March 21 after threats to four journalists from an Islamist militant outfit.
No points for guessing, even if you are just Paanchvi Paas, that the coverage of this incident in the our country's venerable mainstream media was a mere zero.
The news did trickle out from this landlocked state in the form of an Asia News International (ANI) creed. That was all. No one seems to have carried it. No media coverage.
The Editors Guild of India which is always so prompt in issuing condemnation statements whenever there is an attack on a news establishement in mainland India does not seem to have given vent to its non-existent ire either.
So the non-newsworthy Northeast and its lesser-mortal journalists remain out of the news. Till then the newspapers can keep us engrossed by telling us what they thought of the pink T-shirt that RK Sharma was wearing the day he was sentenced in the Shivani murder case. And the TV news channels can keep us glued to the flatscreens with their ball-by-ball coverage of the Rajbir Singh killing.
In these days of TAM ratings and NRS rankings, there cannot be any interest of media owners in what happens in that faraway state.
There's no money in covering Manipur.
[ First published: April 1, 2008
Last updated: September 4, 2010
]
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