The Hindu going out of the way to please Narendra Modi?

Sir,
The Hindu, among all other major Indian newspapers, has voluntarily decided to explain to its readers where ever it finds necessary, what it prints and why, which is what you do through your column. Hence this letter.
Under the title, ‘Report on comment attributed to Narendra Modi denied’, The Hindu published on 29.4.2010 a long, 789 words, denial statement with the following endorsement: “Gujarat government spokespersons Jaynarayan Vyas and Saurabh Patel, both State Ministers, have issued the following statement in Gandhinagar on Wednesday. This statement is in the context of a report published by Gujarat Samachar that falsely attributed to Chief Minister Narendra Modi a comment on Dalits”.
As far as I know, The Hindu had not published the news item that appeared in the Gujarat Samachar and had provoked this rebuttal. What was then the context for The Hindu to publish it?
The statement is a diatribe against the Congress, which it mentions by name 23 times. It is the business of the BJP to do.
There is also a photo of Mr. Modi accompanying the mews, to print which, of late, The Hindu seldom misses a chance.
I was wondering whether it was necessary for The Hindu, an ‘independent’ English newspaper, to join issue with Gujarat Samachar, a regional vernacular newspaper, in which it had apparently no stakes and to do which it had apparently no obligations.
More serious than that, was it necessary for The Hindu to endorse the denial statement by calling the Samachar report ‘false’?
If The Hindu had carried a misinformation earlier, journalistic ethics required it to issue a correction for the sake of its readers. The Hindu here was not trying to dispel a misunderstanding it had caused to its readers. The rebuttal was, therefore, published for some other reason.
We are hearing a lot about paid news these days. The Hindu had been in the forefront of the campaign against the scourge of paid news. But nobody ever discusses other genres of news. All that is not paid news is not clean news. For that matter, news is never clean. There are sponsored news, subsidised news, favored news and captive news, to mention a few.
Just as there is no unbiased news, there is no unbiased newspaper also. The problem for a professedly ‘independent’ newspaper, however, is when the interest becomes patent.
There are newspapers, which are mouthpieces of political parties and corporate interests. Nobody expects them to be unbiased. They are self-admitted captive news media. What they publish is, strictly speaking, paid news. The only difference is that they do not ‘sell’ the print space to outsiders as they are ‘owned’ by their publishers and print only what the boss permits.
In between the ‘owned’ and the ‘sold’, fall all other kinds of news, such as, the ‘sponsored’, the ‘favored’ and the ‘subsidised’. They are definitely contaminated. Incidentally, of all the different kinds, they are the most dangerous. If the reader knows what dish to expect, he may prepare himself to take it with less or more salt as the case is. In the case of interested news camouflaged as ‘independent’, the reader becomes a victim of duplicity.
My fervent question to you is, in which category will a report like the rebuttal statement in respect of Mr. Narendra Modi fall?

P.P.Sudhakaran,
(Retired Professor of History)
301, East Mansion,
No.2, Hutchins Road,
Cooke Town,
Bangalore 5.
Ph. 080 25467483.

Reconciling the irreconcilable

IPL controversy and The Hindu.
Ever since the IPL controversy broke out, The Hindu had been reporting it prominently. It has already written two editorials about it. But, I am sorry to say that, over all, the impression it helped to create is that they were loaded against Shashi Tharoor and were supportive of Nalin Modi. It carried titles that were explicit about Tharoor’s guilt and suggestive of Modi’s innocence - like “BJP wants Shashi Tharoor sacked as IPL row hots up”, “Tharoor abused office, says BJP”, “Question mark over Kochi IPL owners: Modi”, and “Pawar backs Lalit Modi in IPL Kochi row”. The Hindu would be knowing that for many readers the title is the news, and there were enough of them to make the readers feel that Nalin Modi was not guilty of any wrong doing. But, it now turns out that Modi is being investigated for match fixing, tax evasion and many other serious wrong doings.

The latest editorial, ‘Behind and beyond Tharoor’, while squarely condemning Tharoor for his “egregious acts of ministerial misconduct” and demanding a CBI enquiry, saw only an indiscretion on the part of Modi, of only doing “enough to provoke the Income Tax department to carry out a survey on the IPL's funding”. But it now turns out that it is not a survey but an all out investigation of the murky dealings of the IPL during the last three years it was running the 20/20 show, during which time Modi was its Chairman and Commissioner. As Tharoor has already admitted his role in sponsoring Ms.Pushkar, a CBI investigation is needed more in the case of Modi who has not admitted a single wrongdoing.

As a side thought, it occurred to me that The Hindu might have found in Tharoor a perfect punching bag as he had become a common target of both the BJP and the Left Parties. Being able to concur two irreconcilable political outfits is not a mean achievement. Congratulations.