A good criticism of Newspapers by Sushant Taing : So, I picked up todays Delhi edition of the TOI (The The Times of India) and what I saw astounded me - :-) The first 8 pages of the newspaper, yes the first 8 pages contained nothing but only Advertisements, full page ads on each page. (Yes, Im serious) Then finally, todays Headlines & Cover Stories were there on the Upper half of Page Number 9, the bottom half of page 9 again contained Ads. And Page Number 10 again contained a Full Page Ad. The total number of Pages in todays TOI Delhi edition is 30 and out of that, 15 pages (half the paper) featured only FULL PAGE Ads. And thats not all, on quite many pages, almost half to three-fourth of the pages space contains Ads. So, more than 70% of the paper is devoted not to News but to Brand Promotions. Clearly, TOI is a Corporate Sell-Out, a full-time Advertising & Marketing Platform that represents Consumerism in its ugliest form and does some News Reporting (a lot of it is crass celebrity trivia) as an auxiliary activity. If youre a civil services aspirant or simply wanting to brush up on your GK, TOI is not even the last Newspaper that any rational person would recommend to you. ***** That being said, I still somewhat like the TOI simply because I find quite a lot of its reporting to be impartial & unbiased, at least relatively neutral compared to other English media houses of India as we often find various Points of Views expressed in it. I dont know of any other Indian publication where articles by someone as Left-winged as Vandana Shiva, someone as Centrist as Ramachandra Guha and someone as Right-winged as Chetan Bhagat would all appear on the same page. The Hindustan Times is a Congress mouthpiece (its owners have been Congress MPs). The Pioneer (Editor is BJP MP) & NITI Central are both BJPs mouthpieces. The Indian Express & India Today group have for long been kissing the asses of every government that has been in power at the Center. And while DNA has been an impartial paper, it has lately been chickening out and deleting many of its anti-Modi articles. And while The HINDU is in all fairness is the most no-nonsense English newspaper in India and also the best paper when it comes to its layout, the eloquence & erudition of its journalists & contributing columnists, the diverse range of serious stories that it daily covers from all over India & the world, its disinterest in celebrity trivia & advertising and its Liberal Anti-Imperialist ideology, what ruins it for The HINDU is its pro-China bias (its little to no reporting on Chinas despotism in Tibet, Xinjiang & Hong Kong) and also its rather soft stand on Pakistan. But yes, TOI also fails in another department - like most mainstream media houses in India, it also toes Indias line on Kashmir the way The HINDU does it for China.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 16:03:11 +0000
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