Do the media waste too much time trying to be kind to the dead? If you go by the way in which Indira Gandhi has been treated by the mainstream English press and TV channels, then probably not.

By and large, the treatment accorded to the 25th anniversary of Mrs Gandhi’s death was fair and largely free from mawkish tributes. [Read more]

The relationship between television and politicians continues to fascinate me. Many politicians claim that TV is biased against them. Usually, those who complain are conservatives who feel that journalists are liberals and are therefore biased against them. [Read more]

A funny thing has happened to newspapers over the last year and though we’ve all noticed it, few of us have bothered to discuss this development.

Which is odd, because you would have thought that somebody would have written an obituary by now. [Read more]

In the old days, journalists were prevented from referring to communities while reporting any acts of violence. At some level, this made a certain amount of sense.

If a man picked your pocket then it shouldn’t really matter whether he was a Sikh, a Jain, a Muslim or whatever. All that mattered was that he was a pickpocket. [Read more]

Do newspapers actually put two and two together? We pride ourselves on our ability to take seemingly unrelated events and to put them together so that readers can gain an insight.

But my sense is that most of us fail at this task. This was brought home to me to when I read Maureen Dowd in the New York Times (and nearly everywhere else - she is widely syndicated all over the world) recently. [Read more]