Archives: News Media

There can be genuine problems with running an environmental campaign year after year. Since you can’t harp on the same tune all the time, there is a morbid tendency among campaigners to innovate. At times, certain innovative measures can even be bizarre, or just downright stupid. So it was with the largest British water company, Thames Water’s study that was launched during the World Water Week on August 25. The peg of the press release issued by the company was, “A third of UK women leave the shower running while shaving their legs, wasting around 50bn litres of water a year...

When a leopard strayed into and then gracefully left Hema Malini’s bungalow in the Dindoshi area of northwest Mumbai a week or so back, it became an off-beat news item. Something that people ought to have found funny. What with the Dream Girl finding a new fan, and all that. The incident, however, was anything but off-beat. The news media, by and large, missed the point by miles. The point often lies in contextualising an incident, in this case it certainly had. The myopic failed to notice the spots. It would have been a heaven-sent opportunity to paint the larger picture of the...

The Indian Express, the daily we grew up to revere as the reporter's newspaper, doesn't seem to be so any more. The more you see its reportage on the Tatas, the more it seems to belong to the latter. We ought to have seen it coming when Shekhar Gupta recently walked less and talked more with Ratan Tata. The Tata group is in the thick of the 2G scam, but Gupta came across as one who had decided that they indeed were not and tagged along with Ratan Tata in the NDTV show, Walk the Talk. All through, it was obvious that Gupta wanted to provide the Tatas a forum to...

On August 10, a frantic message landed in the mailbox of members of a Facebook group called Save Niyamgiri. Two leaders of the Dongria-Kondh tribe’s resistance to a controversial mine in Orissa’s Lanjigarh were said to have been abducted, and had subsequently gone missing. The two men were reported to have been ambushed at the base of the hill range where they live, bundled into a vehicle at gunpoint, and driven away. They were not being held at local police stations, Lanjigarh or Muniguda. A third person accompanying them was left alone. HERE'S AN ENCOURAGING UPDATE ...

When skewed concepts of development are the watchwords of the day, it is more than likely that voices against this twisted sense of development don't see the light of day. So when a group that fights for tribal people around the world releases a report on dams, it is damned and made to disappear into the back hole of the news world. That is what happened to happened to the report "Serious Damage: Tribal peoples and large dams" that was released last week by Survival International. The report exposes the untold cost of obtaining "green" electricity from large hydroelectric dams. The...

When it comes to Kashmir, you need to reconcile yourself to a few facts. First, you know as little about the goings-on there as the Indian news media condescends to tell you. And second, you know as much about the happenings there as you delve through alternative sources for news. And a corollary to the first would be that you believe as much rubbish as media wants you to. If you thought from the coverage both in the print and broadcast media that Kashmir was finally in the news, well, here’s some news for you – you fell to the corollary machination. For the last two years while...

The name Sania Mirza seems everywhere these days. Ubiquitous is what they say, I believe. In the sleazy, unimaginative headlines of newspapers. In those garish, framed boxes on websites. On sacrosanct Facebook status messages. And all-pervading Twitter, of course. For all the wrong reasons. Ok, I will concede that Shoaib Malik too is all over. Maybe more so. For all the same wrong reasons. But to me, it is Sania who matters first. That Paki Shoaib Malik is incidental, circumstantial. Come to think of it, I am certainly missing something here. What’s wrong with people? You have...

It ought to be counted as one of India’s most downplayed stories of the day. It is about the struggle to save an ecosystem called Niyamgiri in Orissa from mining, deforestation and devastation. It is about indigenous people and the rights over their land. Vedanta Resources, a stinking rich British company owned by NRI Anil Agarwal, intends to dig an open-pit bauxite mine in Niyamgiri. This mine will destroy the forests on which the Dongria Kondh depend and wreck the lives of thousands of other Kondh tribal people living in the area. The Supreme Court has given the go ahead for the...

The history of the Northeast is the history of romantic insurgencies and pyrrhic wars, devastating blasts and brutal carnages, internecine squabbles and ethnic clashes, political chicanery and myopic governance, and what have you. It is also the history of atrocities. By the agents of the State. When Naga women were raped on church pulpits by the sacrosanct Indian forces, it was something that never coalesced into the form of news. But these days some news do trickle out. Like that of a gutsy girl in Haflong who took on a group of Army jawans, sometime in the last week of July. ...

In July I received a mail from a journalist who wanted to pitch me an interesting story idea from Kashmir. The mail was directed to an account I hardly check. Not that it would have made much difference since Newswatch carries only content that has something to do with the news media. I gather she pitched the story to many publications. The story, let me tell you, never saw the light of day anywhere in this country where Kashmir is such an emotively jingoistic issue. Close to a month later, the story has appeared, but not in an Indian publication. I happened to stumble across it...