The world is in turmoil with the leakage of 50 million personal data from the social media giant, Facebook, through a London- based political strategist company, Cambridge Analytica. It is said the data was used to influence the American citizens to vote for the current President Donald Trump. In In...
Public broadcasting in India has never been free. Whichever party has been in power – left, right or centre – it has wanted Akashvani or Doordarshan to serve its propaganda purposes. People who work in these organisations call themselves ‘media’ persons; but in reality, they are government s...
Many years ago, when Raja Ramanna was the Chairman of the Atomic Commission, he came to the Ramakrishna Mission in Kolkata to deliver an inaugural lecture of a religious convention. He questioned the ‘big bang’ theory and said he would love to believe that the world was created out of ‘somethi...
Preparing for the coverage of the budget, both at the state and the central level, has always been a big occasion for any business newspaper or television channel. It’s an annual ritual, for which all media outfits undertake long planning processes.Changes in technologies have made the process of ...
The Prime Minister, before his departure to Davos to speak at the World Economic Forum, gave a remarkable interview to a television channel – perhaps one of his best so far. He spoke about India becoming a ‘bright star’ in the global economic scene; he criticised the Congress (asking it to ref...
Can India have a media, which is distinctly its own? By definition, media connects people with the country and the country with the rest of the world. Indian media cannot cut itself off from the rest of the world for if it does, it will be failing in its duty of keeping the people fully informed. Bu...
A recent report published by the Reuters Foundation in collaboration with Oxford University reveals that India has emerged as one of the fastest-growing markets for US-based technology companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. India’s Twitter users currently number at 26.7 million, and as of J...
The 15-20 minute discussions on international TED Talks have been instant hits worldwide. The introduction of the TED Talks India has brought in another innovation, keeping in mind the low retention rate in the age of social media. The first TED Talk India, which was launched with much fanfare this ...
The Indian media often refers to the 21-month ‘emergency’ (1975-77) to demonstrate the consequences of a government clamp down. The heroic fight back of some of the media houses is shown as having brought ‘freedom’. Four decades have passed; the society has changed and so has its media. But ...
Media’s election coverages, in many cases, start with the reporter asking the car driver in which he travels - ‘what is the scene?’- and then, sometimes unfor-tunately, ends there. There was a story, almost convincingly circulated among media people, that a famous reporter wrote and file...