Silencing Criticism: Kannada editor B.V. Seetaram’s arrest

Silencing act

VIKHAR AHMED SAYEED
Kannada journalist B.V. Seetaram’s arrest highlights the intolerance of quasi-religious and other powerful forces towards criticism.


B.V. Seetaram, Editor of "Karavali Ale".
IN an interview with Frontline on the morning of January 4, B.V. Seetaram, the 54-year-old director of Chitra Publications, which publishes the midday Kannada newspaper Karavali Ale (The Coastal Wave), expressed an uneasy foreboding that he would be arrested. “The district administration has not responded to my calls for protecting Karavali Ale and is, instead, looking for an excuse to target me,” he remarked. That evening, Seetaram was detained by the Udupi police near the small town of Karkala in Udupi district in southwestern Karnataka. Seetaram and his wife Rohini were served a warrant in a two-year-old defamation case.

According to sources close to Seetaram, 25 policemen surrounded his house in Mangalore when he was on his way to Karkala. He was served the warrant while he was en route, and he was produced before the local Magistrate the next day. He was charged under Sections 500 and 501 of the Indian Penal Code (defamation) at the court of the Civil Judge (Junior Division) and Judicial Magistrate, First Class, in Udupi and remanded in judicial custody until January 17, after he refused bail apprehending a threat to his life if he was arrested by the Mangalore police.

Karavali Ale, founded in 1991 by Seetaram and his wife, is a six-page Kannada broadsheet published from Mangalore and Karwar. The duo also heads three other publications in the region – an English weekly called Canara Times and two Kannada dailies Sanje Ale and Kannada Janantaranga. Karavali Ale, priced at Rs.3 and with estimated sales of more than 50,000 copies, was the leading midday newspaper in the coastal districts of Dakshina Kannada, Udupi and Uttara Kannada before December 2008 when a series of attacks on its distribution network dented its circulation.

Delivery vans carrying copies of the newspaper were reportedly stopped and attempts were made to burn the copies. On December 11, 2008, miscreants burnt 5,000 copies of the newspaper. News agents and hawkers were intimidated by men belonging to right-wing groups. According to Seetaram, the circulation of Karavali Ale declined by almost 20 per cent, and advertisers were very reluctant to advertise in the newspaper. “I lost at least Rs.5 lakh in December,” he said.

The immediate provocation for the attacks was a report in the newspaper on December 1. A Dalit organisation called Dalit Sangharsha Samiti had issued a press statement in which it criticised Rajashekhara Nanda Swami of the Gurupura Vajradehi Matha. The statement, which was carried in Karavali Ale, alleged that the Swami behaved in a discriminatory manner with the Dalit residents of the area when he went to attend on November 30 an event that discouraged conversion to Buddhism. Earlier, on November 17, there was an attack on the printing press of the newspaper after it carried a report that cast doubts on the method of acquisition of land for the Mangalore Special Economic Zone (MSEZ) in Kudubipadavu village in Dakshina Kannada district. more

Mukherjee criticises TV channels for Mumbai coverage

Thu, Dec 11 10:03 PM

New Delhi, Dec 11 (IANS) External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee Thursday criticised TV channels for their 24x7 coverage of the Mumbai terrorist attack, which jeopardised the lives of hostages, and asked them to learn 'where to stop and where to pause' by putting national interests above commercial considerations.

'In our anxiety to beat the other channels in publicity, we were showing some crowds of people on screens. Instructions then came to the terrorists to throw a grenade at the crowds so that they would run away,' Mukherjee said in the Lok Sabha during a dicussion on the Nov 26 attack.

'Some lives were lost because of the anxiety to get publicity. If the camera was not focused there, if the crowd was not found there, perhaps these things would not have happened,' he said.

'So, we have to draw the lesson where to stop and where to pause,' he stressed.

'When they (security forces) were sacrificing their lives, at a safe distance, if somebody thinks that he will defeat his competitors by buying larger viewers by giving updated news, he may serve the interests of the company but surely he or she will not serve the interests to the nation,' Mukherjee said.

With the Mumbai attacks in the backdrop, the government Wednesday decided to set up a coordination committee with broadcasters to ensure a degree of self-regulation to ensure balanced coverage.

In a meeting with broadcasters, Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting and External Affairs Anand Sharma told them that their continued coverage was having a negative effect and also affecting tourism and civil aviation.

Sharma said that while the media in the country was free, it should exercise this independence with restraint and responsibility.  source

853 sites blocked in Turkey.

Turkey lifts ban on world's largest blog service

Tue, Oct 28 09:25 PM

Ankara, Oct 28 (DPA) Turkish Internet users regained access to millions of blogs Tuesday after a court ordered a temporary reversal of a ban on a blog hosting website imposed Friday.

The move reopens access to Blogger, a blog hosting service owned by Google. The service was banned by a court after a Turkish station complained that some 60 blogs were illegally showing videos of Turkish football matches.

Attempts to visit the site diverted users to a notice in English and Turkish explaining that access had been suspended.

Broadcaster NTV Tuesday reported that the Diyarbakir court had ordered the ban to be lifted and called for 'missing evidence'. The court could re-implement the ban once the missing evidence is provided, according to the broadcaster's website.

Turkish internet users are used to court-ordered bans of a large range of websites. The video-sharing site Youtube has been banned for hosting a video insulting the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Adnan Oktar, an Islamic creationist has also been successful in getting a variety of sites banned by court decisions, including blog hoster Wordpress and the personal website of renowned biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins.

According to the government's Telecommunications Board, as of Aug 18, 2008, 853 sites were blocked in Turkey. 

 source 

Self-regulation by media is best

Editorial, The Asian Age, October 7, 2008 

News and current affairs broadcasting on television can hardly said to have covered itself with glory, although it has been some two decades since private channels made their entry. While production values have been less than ordinary in most cases, it is the content purveyed which often fails to clear the mark of professionalism. Sensational, insignificant and, at times, uncorroborated datum is known to be paraded as news or information. Regrettably, there are occasions when it is hard to tell the difference between some established news channels and those that flaunt their yellow journalism. This was, for instance, the case with the reporting on the Aarushi murder. Both shocked the country — the brutal and senseless killing of a 14-year-old girl and the breathless news reports on television with an eye for little more than lasciviousness. Sensing an opportunity, the government hinted at measures to restrict content. Fortunately, it didn’t go that far. In a democracy, it will be hard to stomach any intervention by government in the matter of regulation of media content. Now the News Broadcasters Association — which represents 30 channels run by 14 broadcasters — has on its own come forward to create a News Broadcasting Standards (Disputes Redressal) Authority for the purposes of self-regulation.

Ungainly as the name sounds, this is a welcome step. It speaks of a sense of responsibility to the viewers on the part of the broadcasters. It is commonly thought that television channels show a propensity to be sensationalist in a competition for eyeballs. With ad-spends shooting up since the liberalisation of the economy and globalisation, leading media players — not just in television — have courted the dramatic, the lurid, and the loud with a view to grabbing readers and viewers. But this appears to be a jaded trick. There are signs of the audience being put off. Many who were in the forefront of the trend now give the impression of mixing the sensible old norms of good journalism with only a dash of the sensational. The establishing of the NBSA last Thursday appears to be a step in the same broad direction. TV broadcasters just need to remember that it might be best for them to tone down a shade in order to remain credible. Given the visual nature of their medium, the sensational often appears to be a purposeful distortion to attract attention. source link 

Soumya Viswanathan TV Reporter Killed in Delhi

She was from Kuttipuram in Malappuram, Kerala


NEW DELHI: She was young, vivacious, liked by all and good at her job. Now, she is dead. Mystery shrouds the murder of a 25-year-old producer, from an English news channel early on Tuesday morning at Vasant Kunj in south-west Delhi. Soumya was found dead in her white Zen car with a bullet in her head around 3.40am, about half-a-kilometre from the Vasant Kunj police station on Nelson Mandela Road. She was headed home to C-9 block in Vasant Kunj.  more 

Media Coverage a Passionate appeal by B. S. Raghavan

Media Coverage: "Wanted a balanced Approach" by B. S. Raghavan 

Originally published by Rediff news

Media is Unfair to Azamgarh, a place known for Hindu-Muslim unity

For God’s sake, please stop this madness



Azamgarh is shocked, even angry, at the way the police and the media have labelled it a “nursery for terrorists” ever since the Jamia Nagar encounter in which the police gunned down two boys hailing from this district. In Sanjarpur village, which was raided by the Delhi ATS and UP Police, every journalist is eyed with suspicion.
“A news channel is frequently referring to Azamgarh as ‘aatank-garh’ (haven for terrorists). This is ridiculous. For God’s sake, please stop this madness,” frets a visibly upset Zahid, elder brother of Sajid, one of the two boys gunned down in Jamia Nagar.

What upsets them most is that this “historical place known for its Hindu-Muslim unity is getting a bad name just because of some misguided youngsters. Is it justified?” They ask this to every journalist visiting Azamgarh.

 “Because of its name, most people even think Azamgarh is Muslim-dominated, when actually Muslims form only 15 per cent of the population,”  said Islahi who was president of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) Student Union in the mid-60s.

In fact, Azamgarh, founded around 1665, is named after prince Azam, who was the son of a Rajput ruler.  Vikramajit, a descendant of the Gautam Rajputs, had embraced Islam, and Azam was one of the two sons he had from a Muslim wife. A large section of Muslims here were originally Thakurs or Rajputs who embraced Islam.

“The media and outside world are being unfair,” laments Chunnan Rai, a social worker and poet. “Even the forefathers of Allama Shibli Nomani (secular theologist) were Rajputs who converted to Islam,” he says. He also reminisces of Pandit Nehru’s visit to Azamgarh. “He stayed at the Shibli College guest house.” Shibli College principal Md Iftikhar Ahmed says half the 14,000 students there are Hindus. “Azamgarh has never witnessed any communal violence or major crime. Suddenly it is seen as a terror haven,” he says.

“Azamgarh was peaceful even during the post-Independence communal riots,” says former MP Santosh Singh. 

 ... full story