Times of India reports on attainment levels by primary school students in rural Ahmedabad and wobbles the axis of the spin and propaganda that surrounds discourse on Gujarat. Headlined “Ahmedabad: Show piece or shame!”, the report states that: only 51.5 per cent children studying in village schools in Classes 3 to 5 can even read [...]
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 [...]
via the blog കാറ്റ് :: The Breeze Injipennu, a blogger at Ginger and Mango reports a case of bullying, intimidation, and harassment by individuals working for the website Kerals.com. The matter was over corporate players unauthorisedly using text and pictures produced by independent bloggers without crediting or compensating them. Injipennu reports that Kerals.com staffers engaged [...]
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 [...]
“Going after the politician orbureaucrat is easier than the businessman. Just watch a charming TV anchor flirt with a CEO as she asks him about his corporate philosophy to understand that.” Sidharth Bhatia, DNA, 11 Jan, Link
In 2007, VH1 and Nokia had launched a competition that encouraged individuals to produce their own versions of Pentagram‘s Voice (link). A user (identified on Youtube as Varun Agarwal), in response produced a version that deploys the song to voice angst/protest against the “oppression” of merit. In India, the frame of merit is the construct [...]
Related: “One small question about scam Satyam”, Kafila.org, Link Also see: The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street’s Game of Money, Media and Manipulation, book by Howard Kurtz, Link The Markets and the Media: Business News and Stock Market Movements, Thomas Schuster, Link The strip is licensed to use under the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0“
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 [...]
Talk by Catharine A. MacKinnon at Jamia Milia Islamia, 12 Jan, 2009
