Thursday, July 02, 2009

The end of journalism, Mr Narisetti?

While the news sites and TV channels are all overjoyed with the Section 377 ruling - I refer you back to a blog post I wrote a long, long time ago. Anyway, while I applaud the Delhi High Court, which at times seems to me to be the only sensible HC in India, I am yet to read the details of the case. talking about stuff I wrote a long time, there is this post about us Indians being more racist than most.
Anyway, this post is about something I read about Raju's new employers that left me feeling a bit shaken. (EDIT: WaPo has their ill-thought out plan off, hope no-one at Times Group got wind of it) One can argue that such things have been happening in ndia for a while, but never 'officially'. Sure, sometimes the editor-proprietor, and we know that the line has been very blurred for a while, has used his 'access' to parley favours for friends. But this is akin to MediaNet and whatever the other news organisations call their equivalent organisations charging for access to ministers and the like. Imagine, The Hindu charging for access to MMS, since their old Delhi CoB is now the Media Advisor to the PM. This is like that.
In other news on the media front, while a bunch of people have been removed at News X, some decent people among them whose fault was to align with the old powers that be (even though that was an incredibly stupid thing to do, if you ask me personally), there are people being hired as well. We hear that PGT, long relegated to Lok Sabha TV will be making a Prime-Time talk show return when the channel is rebranded. I really must stop watching news TV completely now, why can't tennis be a year-round sport. And talking about Tennis, here is an open letter...
"Dear Star Sports,
I do not wish or want to watch Sania, Bhupati or Leander Paes play pointless Doubles games when there is a Federer, Nadal, Djokovic or Murray game on. I will be willing to pay you for that. Yes, I realise that I am paying Airtel a lot for bandwidth and can actually watch the games online thanks to some kind soul somewhere in the world streaming the match. But I would much prefer a decent TV stream anyday. I bought a bad-ass 40-inch panel to watch increasing amounts of live sports. I would li9ke to meet the head of your Tennis programming and whack him over the head with a racket. Preferably a very tightly-strung one. This is why I wish that our players lose Doubles rather fast. At least this year, they didn't disappoint me.
Yours Truly,
K"
PS: Weird no, all the Eastern European chiklets got all the Press, but the two Williams' are playing the Womens finals!

2 comments:

Anuj Singhal said...

excellent article dude. as far as wimbledon is concerned, think media has to be blamed for this. Every time Mahesh/Leander/Sania win a meaningless doubles tournament, they flash it like this "Leander wins Wimbledon" Give me a break - these players have found a great way of making money and unfortunately even Sania has now fell in this trap

GBO said...

""Go there and play 2 sets all and then atleast another 30 games and then decide at the end.""