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Barkhagate: How Barkha Dutt Legally Bullies Her Way Out
In what can be deemed as a shameful act, Indian journalism or rather one network and one journalist sinks to another low.
Barkha Dutt….she of the screeching, shouting, TV soap opera fame has through her network sent a legal notice to Chyetanya Kunte, an Indian blogger.
During the terrorist attacks of 26/11 in Mumbai, Kunte wrote a blog post about shoddy journalism (now deleted) that targeted the shenanigans of Barkha Dutt. However the “internets” never forget and the post lives on here.
Kunte writes
If the terrorists don’t manage to shove you in to your private hell, the journalists on national television will certainly help you get there.
And that is a very valid point.
The Indian blogosphere is rightly disgusted.
Barkha Dutt tries to explain herself on this topic on Facebook.
Can you imagine if what would have happened if any of the politicians had dared to sue NDTV for libel. Not only NDTV but everyone in English media would be crying fascism like it was Third Reich. This despite the fact that not only a politician has as much right to redressal as NDTV but also he probably has a stronger case for libel against Barkha Dutt (and English media) than Barkha Dutt has against Chyetanya.
Frankly, I think Barkha Dutt screwed up on this one. By unnecessarily making an issue where none exists, she has further lost credibility. This whole incident reminds me of IIPM-gate.
Am no legal eagle (unlike my sister…a real lawyer and all!) but what would happen if Kunte would ignore this notice and ask BD and NDTV to go take a walk?
IIPM Crooks at It Again
Seems some people just don’t learn. Its been about a year and a half since the whole IIPM fiasco exploded on the Indian Blogosphere. IIPM was found out to be the crooked institute it is. However, they think that public memory is short and hence this advertisement in today’s DNA.
If you are wondering what this is about, read Gaurav Sabnis to know how it all started. And then hop on over to DesiPundit for the most extensive coverage. If you would like to know my thoughts go here.
And this is their latest ad. Surprising that their so called founder director has to publish his article as a paid advertisement. And of course you see ponytail baba there too.
Its a thumbnail. Click to see entire ad and read with clarity.
IIPM: Crooks At Work to Sanitize Image
Its that time of the year again, and it seems that the scumbag machinery is in stealth mode. Indian bloggers will remember October 10, 2005 as the day they came of age and stood up to a scumbag institution that forced a blogger to quit his job, all because to highlighted the truth. Gaurav Sabnis the blogger, and IIPM the scumbag institution.
A lot of venom was spewed, investigative journalism ensued, people expressed their opinions, and it made news in the international blogosphere.
DesiPundit, the clearinghouse for all blogs Indian, became the central rally point. The sustained campaign, made IIPM backtrack a little and their ludicrous claims in the press seemed to have subsided for a while. But just when u think that they would have learnt a lesson, they are back to their old tricks.
This is the season of results. Engineering results, HSC results, medical results, all results will be out in the month or two ahead. This is the time students start thinking about the next step in their professional and academic careers. IIPM puts big ads in newspapers and the students start believing them. But somewhere in the back of their minds they remember hearing something about the said institution. Checking old newspapers or their sites does not help because no mainstream media covered the story with the importance it needed. So the student turns to the biggest media of them all, the internet.
IIPM: Screws Up…Again !!
Dilip D’Souza has a great post on Death Ends Fun about scrupulous advertising by the favorite management instutute of the Indian Blogosphere.
Here is the ad he is talking about. Read his entire post for the whole dissection.
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IIPM Ad in Hindustan Times |
The real state of Indian Media
It is no secret in the Indian blogosphere, that the Indian mainstream media is in the pits. Plagiarism, outright lies, covering up stories, selective reporting, you name it and it happens here.
Today I came across a very interesting post on The Hoot.
The Hoot is
The subcontinent has plenty of media, it does not have enough scrutiny of the media. This portal is the outcome of the concern felt by a group of practicing journalists at some recent trends in journalism in this part of the world. It is an attempt to revive a concern for media ethics, restore focus on development [ link ]
In an article today there is a comparision between the Pakistan and Indian MSM. Titled Cautionary Tales, its an opinion on how the Indian MSM has slipped into being a joke of itself.
Indian papers, driven by the great forces of the market, have been dumbed down to the point where they are indistinguishable from any other consumer product.
IT takes a good two hours in the morning going through a stack of Pakistani newspapers. It takes about half an hour to go through the leading English dailies that you get in Delhi. I have had to read them – newspaper-reading being a habit that members of the tribe carry with their luggage – these past three or four days and I can say with confidence that I don?t know what?s happening in the rest of the world.
Do hop over and read the entire article. It raises some very valid points.
This does not bode well for a country that is aiming to become a world leader in technology, commerce and every other field it can.
There are a lot of things that the US does that I do not agree with. But one thing I find very credible here is the assurance that the MSM will have an agenda and stick to it. If you are the FOX news loving person, then u will think the NYTimes is so far left that its off the horizon. If you need your daily dose of NYTimes, you will stop talking to anyone who even mentions the words Fox and News in the same sentence. But at least the media scene is alive. And whatever your leanings (intellectualy, politically, sexually) you will always have something that gives your mind fodder to chew on.
Sadly that seems to be lacking in most Indian newspapers. They have become jokes of themselves. A simple glance at the e-paper edition of the TOI, found in an obscure link on their site will show you that there are more ads than news in the newspaper.
The only glimmer of hope I see in this scenario is that the Indian blogosphere will step up to the plate and take the initiative to right a wrong. The IIPM fiasco and the blogosphere’s outright attack to correct a wrong, was only a precursor of the things to come in the days ahead.
Blogs and Responsibility
Forbes magazine this week has a cover feature on Blogs and Blogging (free sign-up and/or subscription required). The story revolves around the damage blogging can cause to businesses and reputations and actually gives a point by point strategy as to how to fight back the bloggers who sully the names of companies and individuals. It talks about how a blogger hit out against a company forcing its stock to tumble and a series on enquiries by the authorities etc.
Then the bloggers attacked. A supposed crusading journalist launched an online campaign long on invective and wobbly on facts, posting articles on his Web log (blog) calling Halpern “deceitful,”"unethical,”"incredibly stupid” and “a pathological liar” who had misled investors. The author claimed to be Nick Tracy, a London writer who started his one-man “watchdog” Web site, our-street.com, to expose corporate fraud.He put out press releases saying he had filed complaints against Circle with the Securities & Exchange Commission.
The article takes a very hardline attitude against the bloggers and stops short of calling us crooks and liars and sensationalists. Bloggers have been called journalists of the Jason Blair kind. TO refresh your memory, Jason Blair was the tainted NYT reporter who was found to be lying about covering events and stories, when he was not there at all. Now this is a very strong allegation and a generalization of bloggers, and for such a mainstream magazine to do it, a little shocking.
But if blogging is journalism, then some of its practitioners seem to have learned the trade from Jayson Blair. Many repeat things without bothering to check on whether they are true, a penchant political operatives have been quick to exploit. “Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won’t print. So they’ll give those stories to the blogs,” says Christian Grantham, a Democratic consultant in Washington who also blogs. He cites the phony John Kerry/secret girlfriend story spread by bloggers in the 2004 primaries. The story was bogus, but no blogger got fired for printing the lie. “It’s not like journalism, where your reputation is ruined if you get something wrong. In the blogosphere people just move on. It’s scurrilous,” Grantham says.
Blogging is currently a very generalized medium. Some people stick to using it as an online diary, sharing daily events and stories with a small group of online pals. Others express thoughts and opinions and analyze events and current affairs. Others are more focussed subjects like technology, gadgets or travel. Still others write opinions about anything and everything under the sun that they like or dont like, or cant make up their minds about. And yes there are some that are set up just to spread rumours and false allegations.
This article makes interesting reading in light of the recent happenings in the Indian Blogosphere. Even though the author Daniel Lyons might never have heard of IIPM, some research would have thrown light on the whole fiasco and the Indian Blogosphere’s answer to it, via a knock-out punch to the jaw. In this case bloggers got united, and stood behind fellow bloggers under attack by a big bucks institute. Social responsibility was the name of the game and bloggers went out of the way to research the claims of an institution and disect the evidence and present it to the general public. This was the correct thing to do.
But what if, in the same frenzy, we had all mis-reported on something and had to backtrack. As the article points out, reputations are destroyed and financial and other losses run into millions of dollars.
Blogging currently is at a stage where the internet was in the 1990. So new and so wild that there are no rules and laws to govern it. Trying to impose physical world laws onto blogging is archaic and impractical. Governments are slowly reacting to the internet and setting up rules and guidelines on how it should be. But the nature of the beast is such that it cannot be controlled and tamed. Blogging is even more wild in that regards. One can say anything that he or she wants and be completely anonymous about it. And then it takes only one more blog to pick up the story and the domino effect starts. In the IIPM saga, if Gaurav Sabnis wrote as “IIPMbasher” and never disclosed his identity, the story would have been equally compelling and not as damaging to the individual. It is a different matter that he is a man of morals, ethics and principals and would never do the same.
The question now is about bloggers creating some sort of self discipling. Does there need to be a check and balances mechanism where bloggers develop a certain code of conduct and stick to it. Easier said than done, but nevertheless something that holds value. 
Blogging has evolved a lot since 1997.
The first blog is said to have gone up on Dec. 17, 1997 from a techie who wanted to log cool sites on the Web. By 1998 there were 23 known blogs. In 1999 the first tools to automate a site’s design came out, making blogging easy for anyone. In 2003 the word “blog” made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.
The Indian blogosphere has been on the radar for a while now and as more and more people join, there will be a larger talent pool generated. Of course with the same number of stories, there are more and more interpretations of it and the line between fact and fiction start to blur. In that scenario it is imperative for bloggers to not cross the fine line. In the IIPM fiasco, the mainstream media was slow to jump onto the bandwagon, but when they did, they took the matter seriously enough, even though the stories were generated by “amateur” journalists. This has added a lot of credibility to the whole subset of Indian bloggers. The same level of credibility has to be mantained for us to become a force and as this article shows, bloggers can easily get carried away and lose all the goodwill built up.
As the role of news gathering and dissipation changes in an ever changing world of print, media and online journalism, blogging is here to stay. Whether it will become another form of news reading, or just a trivial hobby of some die hards, is in the hands of the bloggers themselves.
Read the entire article ahead in three parts.
Be responsible when you blog. Thats all I have to say.
Are bloggers parked? Are bloggers just like journalists?…
A very well written article By Daryl D’Monte in IndiaTogether, about the role of bloggers in today’s world.
There is an extensive conversation with Dina Mehta, one of the powerhouses of Indian blogging. The whole IIPM saga is mentioned
Are bloggers parked? Are bloggers just like journalists? The jury is still debating, but clearly bloggers are filling some voids in mainstream journalism, and connecting to net-savvy citizens in an exciting fashion. Blogs are not about to destroy conventional media, but they are making an impact, notes Darryl D’Monte.
Continue reading at IndiaTogether
Transmogrified has a good commentary on the article; and so does our own Curios Gawker
Another one bites the dust
UPDATE: A lot of people have written to me online and off…..and I think I should clear the air. This line was posted at the end of this blogpost and I repost it right at the top again
This is an attempt at satire. There is no intention to hurt the feelings of the named parties……viz One and One and DesiPundit. As for the institution, the less said the better.
In a major development, students of a tainted institution has threatened to immolate themselves and burn down the headquarters of a web hosting company, if it did not remove one of its client websites.
One and One, an internet hosting company has been served notice by an institution in India, asking One and One to take down the website of one DesiPundit.com
DesiPundit is the second entity to be targeted in this war that the institute has been waging against the blogosphere. Earlier, another Indian blogger resigned from IBM after similar threats were made to burn laptops.
DesiPundit sent out a cry for full on battle against the institute and many others in the blogosphere rallied behind the leadership that DesiPundit provided.
It has been learnt from reliable sources that One and One had no choice but to drop DesiPundit from its hosting servers. On querying one of the Pundits, we were informed that One and One sent a legal notice via email to one of the Pundits in the US around 7 AM CST, but since the pundit was sleeping, the notice is still waiting to be served. However it has been already been served by other mediums like email, fax, and pigeon.
This is indeed a sad day for blogosphere. DesiPundit regularly features on everyone’s daily diet of blogging.
The blogosphere awaits the quick return of DesiPundit, stronger than ever, but till then all you get to see is
Desi Head for top Business School
Do not get confused by the title of the post. I am not talking of the scum who heads the alleged “best business school in the world”.
Srikant Datar is the leading candidate to take over as the Dean of the Harvard Business SchoolThis is about the real world and not one dreamed up by some blue ponytailed charlie.
Srikant Datar is the leading candidate to take over as the Dean of the Harvard Business School.
“It might just turn out to be another big story of India shining in the firmament of business academia. The person generating the biggest buzz in the hallowed portals of the Harvard Business School is Srikant Datar, an accounting professor at the esteemed institution. After Kim B. Clarke’s departure as the dean of HBS, Datar is one of the frontrunners for filing up the void which one would argue is the Golden Boot of management education…..BusinessWorldIndia“
A quick search on google reveals that
Indians serving as deans in U.S. business schools include the renowned Dipak C Jain at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University. Yash Gupta, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California; Avijit Ghosh, College of Business, University of Illinois. Ajay Patel, Babcock Graduate School of Management, Wake Forest University; and Mahendra Gupta, Olin School of Business, Washington University, Missouri.
The Harvard Crimson has a big article on this in this week’s issue. It has been posted below.
It is interesting to note that in a week when the dean of one business school shames himself and his institution, another Indian, comes closer to heading a truly world class institute.
More on Srikant Datar
This looks like another case of shoddy journalism. DNA India has a news article online that talks about IIPM, the pony-tailed Dean’s institute of questionable reputation. However on reading the article it appears to be an infomercial.
Wonder if this actually appeared in print, and if so in what manner.