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

So, Archie is marrying Veronica? Or he is not. Actually, he is proposing to Veronica’s maid of honour, Betty Cooper. Or is he?

Confused? Read more

For nearly as long as I can remember, the prevailing consensus in mainstream media has been that liberalization is a good thing. Way back in the 1980s, when Dilip Thakore was the founding editor of Businessworld, he always made it clear that his policy was to back the corporate sector against government because there were too many restrictions on doing business in India. Few editors went quite as far as Malcolm Forbes who used to cheerfully describe his eponymous magazine as a capitalist tool, but there was no doubt that few socialists would ever make it to the top editorships. Read more

I’m not the world’s greatest Times of India fan. I have frequently been critical of many of the group’s initiatives. I opposed the shift downmarket which influenced so many other newspapers. I was appalled by the Times during the early years of the century when it was run by brand managers. (Fortunately, editors seem to be back in charge judging by the content in recent years). I remain bitterly opposed to Medianet, which is a form of prostitution. And as a group, the Times is petty and graceless. Read more

How  great  is  the  journalist’s  right  to know? Over the last week, this subject  has  been  discussed again and again in the West with many journos and non-journos offering widely divergent points of view.

The  provocation  for this debate has been the rescue of Stephen Farrell, a British  journalist  who  works  for  the  New  York  Times. Read more

Why are most panel discussions on Indian television so boring? I’ve been racking my brains to try and figure out why we get it so wrong and Americans get it so right. Of course, this is not to say that all Indian discussions are dull. I have been on a fair number of interesting ones myself. But I don’t think anyone seriously disputes that the average standard could do with some improvement. Read more