The clouds of uncertainty hanging over the Lok Sabha have only been becoming murkier by the day. There is no one to furnish you with a clear picture because everyone who is either a stakeholder himself/herself or is physically keeping track of the goings-on, is not able to make much of the fast-changing equations – what we have, therefore, is a scenario that is perhaps as nebulous as it was when the game of alignments began.

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 language that you use will more often than not show your stand. Especially when the issue at hand is a contentious one. Let's see what the media reported on Day One. A Bureau report on ZeeNews.com said 'Pesticides in Coke, Pepsi brands again: CSE'. [Link] Does that mean that there were no pesticide residues in the soft drinks in the 2003-2006 period, irrespective of whether someone found these contaminants or not? The first sentence says: Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) on Wednesday came out with a fresh study claiming the presence of "pesticide cocktail" in 11 brands of soft drink giants Coca Cola and Pepsi. The second goes on to say: The revelation comes three years after CSE released its first study on pesticides in soft drinks.

Making a news item out of another news feature is usually a bad idea. It is worse still if the story itself does not stand. And that is what it was with the Press Trust of India (PTI) item of March 26 which told us about Time magazine commending the work of Sunita Narain and Bhure Lal. "And it was largely due to their fight that the last diesel bus had left Delhi by December 2002 and 10,000 taxis, 12,000 buses and 80,000 rickshaws were powered by CNG" is what the report said. So far, so good.