About this time last year I already wanted to quit NewsX, barely three months after joining the place. What went wrong so soon? I had such high hopes for NewsX.

A network started by Peter Mukerjea for chrissakes! He headed STAR TV! The news channel would be headed by Vir Sanghvi! One of the few Indian journalists I knew off, he wrote and spoke extremely well and I respected him immensely. These were excellent credentials to me and despite it being a news channel I signed up because I thought I would get to make some great programming and I would learn a whole lot from the Brits that Peter brought in to get the channel off the ground. The same Brits who hired me as a Producer for the channel.

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve made a boat-load of mistakes in my life but NewsX has to be among the biggest. Where do I even begin?

The Brits.

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Rants Andrew Barron, Arup Ghosh, Avirook Sen, Barron TV, douchebag, India, Indrani Mukerjea, indrani mukherjee, INX Network, Karan Thapar, Karun Thakur, News X, NewsX, NewsX fiasco, NewsX Sale, Peter Mukerjea, peter mukherjee, Vir Sanghvi, Wall Street Journal, WSJ

A couple of weeks have gone by since the terror attacks in Mumbai and I thought I’d just write about the reactions of various groups of people to what happened.

This is a follow-up to my previous post. Bombay. How I loved you.

Lets start with the ‘media industry’. A lot of people raised a huge stink about Barkha Dutt’s grating coverage of the events and the huge cock-up about whether the hostage situation at Nariman House was over or not. There is even a group on Facebook called ‘Get Barkha off air’ or some such crap.

Please. Get Barkha off air? She may look like a dog, sound like nails on a chalkboard and ask the most inane questions but people who say that she used to be great but has sold out, ought to get a clue. Also, part of essential reading for all students of journalism and mass communication, especially all the wannabe Barkha Dutts doing piece-to-cameras for news channels ought to be this book.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media – Noam Chomsky

Books, Rants barkha dutt, bombay blasts, douchebag, facebook, gandhi, India, indian press, indira gandhi, manmohan singh, mumbai, mumbai terror attacks, namrata siviya, narendra modi, NDTV, priyanka gandhi