The great media blackout on the Radia tapes is   finally ending. Maybe editors and others who said that they could not use the tapes or transcripts for lack of authentication are waking up to the the fact that there have been no statements of denial from the principals, except for Barkha Dutt saying the conversation was misrepresented. She does not say it did not take place. Neera Radia has now...

The Hindu MEDIA FOCUS: "Perhaps because of the large number of journalists involved in the controversy, most Indian newspapers and TV channels have not covered the Radia tapes at all." The Niira Radia episode raises questions about the boundary between legitimate news gathering, lobbying and influence peddling. The publication of taped conversations between Niira Radia — a lobbyist for Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata with a keen interest in the allocation of...

It is quite likely that a few weeks from now someone will be knocking at your doors and asking for your fingerprints. If you agree, your fingerprints will enter a national database, along with personal characteristics (age, sex, occupation, and so on) that have already been collected from you, unless you were missed in the “Census household listing” earlier this year. The purpose of this exercise is to build the National...

Politicians, business persons, civil servants, a range of professionals, including doctors and organisers of sports events, and even the judiciary have been in the media spotlight on charges of corruption, nepotism, sleaze and worse. It was to be only a matter of time before the media and media professionals came under public scrutiny for similar acts of omission and commission. The expose on paid news content in the media was...

Fifty thousand jobs? The U.S. economy has lost that many every week, on average, for a straight 140 weeks since December 2007. Now that the media's gush and drool over the Obama visit has run dry — thanks to other far more interesting events — it might be worth looking at a couple of ‘outcomes' that much of our media seemed pretty taken with.‘Twenty deals worth 10 billion dollars that create...