Media-corporate links are structural. But journalists, certainly entrenched ones, can choose whether they wish to be stenographers or not. It was gratifying to have the head of India's most reputed business house confirm the existence of crony capitalism in the country. True, others have believed this for 20 years but it carries more weight when Ratan Tata says so. As he put it in a television interview with admirable candour: “Yes,...

The Radia tapes reveal the networks and routers, the source codes and malware that bind the corporate and political establishments in India. As squeamish schoolchildren know only too well, dissection is a messy business. Some instinctively turn away, others become nauseous or scared. Not everyone can stomach first hand the inner workings of an organic system. Ten days ago, a scalpel — in the form of a set of 104 intercepted...

This is a real story. In the early 1980s, a senior editor of a national newspaper met a state Congress leader and made a report out of that frank conversation, which made sensational disclosures about the dictatorial way Indira Gandhi was running the Congress at that time. The Congress leader, however, had argued that the entire conversation was off-the-record and, therefore, not meant for publication. The newspaper was in agreement...

NIIRA RADIA, the lobbyist at the heart of India’s audacious multi-billion telecom swindle, inaugurated a Krishna temple she funded in south Delhi on her birthday — that, interestingly, coincides with Indira Gandhi’s. Those present on the occasion said Radia prayed for long, presumably seeking divine intervention to wriggle out of the country’s biggest scandal. Before the temple visit, notices from the country’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), Income Tax (IT) Department and the...

Two years ago, when I told some of my more cynical fellow-tribals from the journalistic fraternity that I was about to complete a textbook on media ethics, they smirked. Media ethics? That’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, they said glibly. What became apparent to me then was that the image of the journalist in India has taken quite a battering. There are many among the aam admi who still...