P Sainath states that the structural shutout of the poor is evident in the way beats are organised in newspapers.

We can continue to build defences, try to fight against the bad guys, or mend the shredded cloth of democracy through which our naked body is clearly visible.

Talk about the role of mass media in the history of South Asia and  making history in South Asia and the world. This couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. The web site of the Consulate General of India at Chicago has posted a clip of Martin Luther King address to India via All [...]

The media coverage of Mark Penn dropping the PPP account last year hides more than it informs, in particular how public opinion is shaped and the weaknesses of Indian media’s foreign news coverage. Late December 2008, Times of India, The Hindu, Sify.com, DNA, NewsX picked up a Politico.com report about Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategist Mark [...]

Wonder how this missed the eye of the Indian mainstream media. Laura Rozen of Foreign Policy reports that Obama is trying to reach out to foreign policy experts before the presidential bubble closes in on him. For this he gathered experts for a dinner meeting that stretched for hours after. The attendees included: Iran scholar [...]

According to an internal memo posted on the media watchdog site The Hoot, Monika Halan, the editor of Outlook Money has quit over what she called “conflict of interest between edit and management”: But there is an increasing conflict of interest between edit and management and my work ethics do not allow me to be [...]

In his last press conference, George W Bush, outgoing President of the USA arguing against the suggestion that the country’s moral standing in the world had been dented cited India and said: “go to India, and ask about, you know, America’s — their view of America.” On 25 September, the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh [...]

A press release from Verso Books: Slavoj Zizek: maverick philosopher, author of over 30 books and today’s most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes, providing an acute analysis of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as [...]

As a media researcher one looks at how public discourse is being shaped, particularly concerning issues of public policy and how facts, lies, spin, and propaganda is used to further ideologically-driven agendas, all the while couching it is in the language of reason and argumentation. Take the case of public healthcare. Economic-liberals (or neo-liberals if [...]

Raju Narisetti, former editor of Mint, had defended an anonymised polemic by an “IAS officer” about the failures of the government over the war on terror (link  here). This had broken out into a war of sorts between the government, Mint, and Business Standard (I would like to acknowledge Raju Narisetti’s blog Romantic Realist, without [...]