The Shoe Finally Pinches TOI

“The conventional approach is, therefore, imperfect since it does not capture the information that is of most relevance to teenagers and younger audiences. Advertisers or PR agencies have come to acquire a near monopoly of the information supply in these areas. Newspapers often have to rely on these sources of information for their copy. It is not unusual for newspapers to use leads from PR agencies to make their own copy. Professional news gatherers have long since ceased to treat PR agencies as anathema; indeed, many see them as an invaluable 'source'.”

The para above wasn’t written by me. It’s a quote from TOI’s article introducing Medianet in 2003. What exactly is Medianet? It replaces the PR firms planting articles in the media. TOI decided to do it themselves. So when you open your Sunday edition and look at the glossy supplements with a grand story on best wines (with pics of some top brands prominently featured) or the luxury-leather business you should know who’s been working really hard. Then there’s Private Treaties, another of TOI’s innovations. You should have known better; nothing is free at TOI. Want publicity for your movie? You pay TOI! Want a new launch reported? You pay TOI! Having a convention or a seminar and invite the press to cover? You pay TOI. Nothing is free! Being the leader, TOI’s frivolous practices have been quickly emulated by almost the entire media. And all this crap under the privilege of “journalism”.

Any genuine marketer will tell you advertising doesn’t sell. Publicity does! Sometimes even bad publicity sells (That’s why Bollywood often engineers controversies just before release of some movies). That’s why Arvind Kejriwal does a “nautanki” on the streets. Samir Jain learned from Richard Branson. You see, Branson didn’t have money to advertise or impress the press, so he undertook his own crazy stunts which the media had to report, for free. Samir Jain saw that as opportunity to make more money and that nothing should be reported free (read TOI Story). His brother Vineet Jain, who jointly runs the business, told New Yorker’s Ken Auletta: “We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business”. So what explains the following which appeared as a “Note to readers” by TOI on January 23, 2014 (edited excerpt)?

It is being said that this paper, after initially supporting AAP, has now 'turned' against it. We were prepared for this. We have been called pro-Congress, anti-Congress, pro-BJP, anti-BJP. We have been accused by some of being cheerleaders for Narendra Modi, and by others of running a campaign against him. And depending on who you listen to, we are either too soft or too hard on Rahul Gandhi. Truth is, we have no political masters, nor do we have any hidden agendas. The only side we take is that of our readers… We want to make India a better place for our children; we want them to grow up with hope, not despair. Our job is to inform, educate, entertain, guide, and above all, help every reader realise his or her full potential… We believe taxpayers have a right to expect that their money is spent honestly, prudently and wisely—instead of disappearing down the ratholes of sloth, corruption and political handouts. We believe natural resources need to be allocated fairly and transparently. We believe that business, when honestly conducted, is good for the nation. We believe in the creation of opportunity for the greatest number. We will support Modi, Rahul, Kejriwal and every other politician every time they do the right thing. But no one should expect a blank cheque from us. Our sole allegiance is to our reader, not to any politician or party.

Really? TOI cares about its readers? Then it gets even better! TOI wants to make India a better place for children? I apologise if you fell off your chair. It’s not your fault. Did TOI suddenly have an attack of conscience? We don’t know, we can only make a fair estimate. But what I can tell you with a certain amount of confidence is that money has to be behind the note. Nothing else drives TOI.

It is true that as India’s biggest advertising house TOI generates enough money and can withstand being bulldozed by politicians or political parties. But it is also true that some of their biggest advertisers do have political leanings. I cannot list all the crimes of TOI over the years but let me give one good example of how the reader is treated as a fool by this ad agency. A reader buys a paper and trusts the front page for the most important news of the day. Advertisers like the quarter page ad on the front page (usually at the bottom right) because the ad attains “news status” and is impossible to miss.

TOI thought what the hell; let’s make the ad the front page itself. This started sometime back and once in March 2010 it started with a full front page and went on through the inside pages as well for a new car brand. TOI doesn’t care about the irritation it causes the readers. Mind you, I am in no way suggesting ads shouldn’t be carried in an innovative manner but then don’t also brag about caring for readers if one is going to spam them on the front page. The practice of front page ads got better and better. The one on the left is a latest one from this month. There is something interesting about this. TOI realised that since their front page had become a “hoarding”, readers were smart enough to just pull out the whole page and dump it and not even bother looking at it. Now TOI feels a lot smarter, you know. So what they do now is use adhesive and paste that “hoarding” on top of the real “news front page” so you will have to tear it off before you get to the news page. Care for readers? Who are these scumbags fooling?

Now, where political nonsense of TOI is concerned the entire group, like many others, has been hounding the BJP and Narendra Modi in particular. I doubt anybody missed that. The most glaring example of this grand adventure would be that of the fake “Rambo” report after the Uttarakhand floods in June 2013. Anyone remember that? That bogus story was in the media for several days and played over and over again on TV. Now that page has disappeared but the clarification issued by TOI remains:

And that clarification was dumped in some inside page. LIE BIG, retract small. That’s the technique used. Based on this bogus report other group sidekicks of TOI also start writing blogs on their site with the hilarious lies. Here is one Prashant Panday who is trigger-happy to heap nonsense without much fact-checking:

Where did that Rambo come from? Salma reports it and Sabrina quotes it? Then this same Panday writes BJP claimed 11 lakhs attended Modi’s Patna rally under “bogus crowds”. I’m not sure this number has been claimed anywhere. Then Panday wrote crap about Arun Jaitley and then withdrew the article with a clarification stating his mumbo-jumbo was based on some other news reports. In short, peddling of sheer nonsense! Does TOI have an editor at all? And if that isn’t enough here is another one by TOI where it carries a silly article “Narendra Modi’s solar eclipse” laughably in two different pages by two different writers:

There is much more that can be dug out but that will only exhaust you. And they synchronise the whole campaign with their TV channel. Can TOI explain how it was honest to its readers and viewers when it carried a 19-part witch-hunt of Nitin Gadkari on TimesNow? Or have they already forgotten that? And now they claim they are politically non-aligned. And what are the great practices at TOI? Let’s get some more.

The PCI’s “Paid News” report was buried by the council till it was brought out by pressure and compulsion. Featuring prominently in that report was TOI, as the leader in bringing unethical practices to the news media. Both Private Treaties and Medianet received adverse mentions in that report. You can read the full report here. All their Medianet and Private Treaties related articles and supplements had scant respect for the readers and I would have to say “dishonest” to readers. So all this whining with our “allegiance is to our reader” can’t be taken even with a truck-load of salt. And where the voice of a reader or observer is adverse to TOI then they use their muscle-power to legally drown those voices. This action by TOI against a blogger called Aparajita Lath is worth a read. A young law student, all that Aparijita had done was write an article based on facts and information already in the public domain and nothing more. TOI bullies her but doesn’t take action against any of those powerful people she had quoted in her article.

Did TOI support AAP? Absolutely yes! But it is certainly not the only one. I have time and again pointed out that for over a year when the AAP was neither in govt nor opposition anywhere, their members were allowed a free ride to play the “monkey” and hurl abuses and mindless nonsense against Congress, BJP and against every politician of their choice without any responsibility. Slowly, it became clear that the primary target of AAP was BJP and not the Congress. Are we to believe that all the so called pundits and experts at TOI and Times Now are such idiots that they weren’t seeing all this? Rajdeep Sardesai wonders why this note by TOI. He may have to issue such a note himself one day because CNN-IBN group too has been promoting AAP for a long time. Ashutosh of IBN7 is proof of someone pretending to be a journalist while being a political activist.

TOI doesn’t give a damn about anything but money. So I would ask them to spare the moral sermon. This note to readers can come only for a few reasons. Circulation is falling and readers are seeing through their biased “advertisements” for some political party. A big advertiser must have threatened to pull all advertising if they “did not behave”. And last, but not the least, it is election season and some powerful political party may have threatened to pull out campaign ads if they “did not behave”. These are my estimates and can vary. But one thing is for sure as Vineet Jain said TOI is not in the news business but in the advertising business. Somewhere, the shoe of ads must be shrinking and it is probably starting to pinch.

PS: Please vote on the India’s worst journalists poll -2014 (Right margin of this page).

Sweat Love Story - Part 2

Beni Prasad Verma was right in a way about Salman Khurshid. In the days of scams worth hundreds of thousands of crores why would a minister like Khurshid scam a measly 71 lakhs? Practices by team members usually follow those set by the bosses. The boss either indulges in or approves and overlooks corruption. It is, therefore, hardly a surprise that most cases of corruption come from Congress or Congress-ruled states.  Even the size and nature of Shashi Tharoor’s 70 crores shouldn’t usually worry the Congress.

Barter is a very old form of trade. It still exists and there are even online companies that provide barter services. As transactions get more sophisticated barter trade acquires new names and meanings. Sweat equity (SE) is really not very different from barter. Only, in the case of Sunanda Pushkar (SP) we have no idea what was being bartered. We do know of equity being allotted to her but have no idea what she delivered in return or was hoping to. A very clever barter system was devised by none other than Times of India. It fashionably called it ‘Private Treaties’ (PT). Companies used to seek and pay for publicity, pay for suppressing adverse reports and, of course, for normal advertising. The last part is fine but TOI decided since the first two parts are already being done by PR people why not legitimise it and run private treaties.

Under PT TOI picks up an equity stake in a company in return for publicity through advertisements, news reports, or advertorials in print or TV. Usually these are young but promising companies that are likely to go public in some time. So, for services provided, PT gets equity from a company. Is it any different from sweat equity? No, not really. When the public issue does come about and share prices are sky high TOI sells off the equity and makes a killing. So if 70 crores of SE were given to Sunananda, who knows, in five years it might have been worth 200 crores if everything else had gone smoothly. We’ll never know.

If you search deeper you are likely to find that under PT TOI hid many facts, passed off advertisements as news or editorials and in certain cases went much beyond. As Moneylife explains, in the case of Pyramid Saimira Ltd. journalists and the company owner colluded to forge a SEBI order and illegally made a killing with inflated prices of its shares. The persons involved have since been banned from trading by SEBI. The innocuous concept of SE does come with its own lethal doses of crimes. In another case ‘The Hoot’ discovered something unusual about an accident involving lifts at a construction site in Bangalore. The accident caused some deaths but while other newspapers named the construction company TOI didn’t mention the company at all. Well, that’s somewhat like an Indian house-wife who never mentions her ‘bread-winner’ husband by name. Turns out the builder, Sobha Developers, is a husband in TOI’s private treaties. Such sweat love, isn’t it? TOI has now made PT sound even more fashionable and stylish; they now call it Brand Equity Treaties Ltd. Brand Equity, a supplement in Economic Times, also used to conduct quiz competitions between corporate houses under the ‘Brand Equity Quiz’.

So what exactly is Sunanda so upset about the ‘50Cr’ tag? Well, not really her but the “ever-Aurat-ki-Izzat” loving media. The first one she ran to was NDTV. I have long back written a post: “Tainted? Have a chat with Barkha”. Lately in Barkha’s absence Sunetra Chaudhary fills in for her. But let’s not deviate. This NDTV is the same channel where Syed Bukhari called Shabana Azmi a “Naachne wali, Gaane wali” in a live program. Umm.. I guess both are “secular” so that can pass. This is the same NDTV who more or less painted Bhanwari Devi a money and fame-chasing whore in their article “Bhanwari Devi was determined to live a life less ordinary”. You can be forgiven for reading the article and believing BhanwariDevi sort of invited her murder. And the murderers? Oh some Congressmen are accused, so that case is likely to linger for eons. Their group editor, who else but Barkha Dutt, outraged against the ‘50Cr’ but forgot how she suggested women “self-combusted” over loutish politicians (This was around the suicide of Geetika Sharma in which politician Gopal Kanda has been accused and the other probably a reference to Bhanwari Devi). It wasn’t NDTV alone, Headlines Today and CNN-IBN didn’t lag behind. Any idea why all of a sudden these channels were so enthusiastic in letting SP, the oh so ‘Bhartiya Naari’, play ‘victim’ on TV? I leave that for you to figure out.

All this when just two years ago our media was eager to trash SP. Some headlines are quite interesting. Outlook called her a “..Girl, named Sue”. Can’t be sure, but this was probably picked up from the legendary late Johnny Cash’s country song about “A boy named Sue” who wanted to kill his father for naming him so and finally finds the reason why he was so named. Even Tehelka, the cheap tabloid, didn’t want to be left behind and headlined her a “Vamp” in an article supposedly meant to defend the woman. Sensationalism, Tehelka style! Not to be left behind Indian Express in “Jammu to Dubai…” carried a comment that shockingly casts more aspersions on the woman than any other comment you may have heard. I wonder if IE would have carried the comment today. That comment is from someone who claims to know SP but we can’t take that on face value. Mind you, I’m not in any way endorsing that comment or treating it as true or validating it. Just showing our media what they carry in their pages depending on the sign of the times.

Sweat is thicker than love. It pays! Robert Vadra bought a piece of land for 7.5 Crores. He pays for it with a cheque (A cheque? All of it with a cheque? Ha!) that is not to be presented. It’s money he never even had in the first place. He shows the amount as a ‘ghost-loan’ or OD from Corporation Bank in his books. A few months later he sells it to DLF for 58 crores. Neat! Surely, land prices didn’t go up that dramatically, did they? No! But I guess Vadra sat on that piece of land and sweated for four months to earn get the difference of over 50 crores for the same land. How did he sweat? Well, he got the Haryana govt to alter the land use privileges for that land in a jiffy and that’s the sweat he added. After being rattled from their slumber our media now reluctantly carries stories of Vadra’s land dealings. The Hindu’s latest article even reveals “Web of political links helped Vadra’s land deals”. Sweat love can be expressed in different ways. 50Crs tag for SP or 50Crs profit to Vadra.

The most intriguing aspect of the whole story is that fountain of sweat love; Rendezvous Sports. Very apt name, Rendezvous! Who or what exactly is Rendezvous? Who funds it and where did the funds come from? That’s what started the whole controversy in the first place. Ironically, it’s another Modi, Lalit Modi, who let Tharoor’s sweat out of the bag by disclosing the background through Twitter. With a 26% share in Kochi IPL team, this company handed out free gifts to many. 5% was handed out to SP for her sweat. Even Salman Khurshid stated back then that the ROC may look into Rendezvous to check if they violated rules to enter IPL. The IT Dept. stated it will initiate an investigation. Ever heard anything? Ever heard any media outlet following up on that story? The story dried up and died. Not surprising. The right question that the media cronies aren’t asking is “Who is Rendezvous and why was SP given SE in the first place?” Not even in the latest series of interviews was SP asked the question. I guess it’s not relevant for the purpose of the interviews.

While SP is a character in this story it’s not about her. She doesn’t realise how the media used her first as a “vamp” and now as a “victim” to suit their own agenda. But SP played right into their hands uttering typical victimhood rubbish. I do have a message for our media and SP. Stop teaching us we need to go to convents to learn about “cattle class” and that PDA means “Public Display of Affection”. What SP did show right through is a different type of PDA; “Public Display of Affront” and contempt for the intelligence of ordinary men and women. To indulge in opaque deals and then for the media to present certain people as “victims” is where our media becomes the first line of defence for the corrupt. Sweat Equity is a good thing; it’s a good concept for budding entrepreneurs who aren’t cash-rich. Unfortunately, in India, the powerful public figures are capable of turning any good concept into a delivery system for bribes. After all, even that DLF CEO, Kushpal Singh, called bribery “facilitating speedy disposal”. To rephrase the great, revered freedom-fighter: “Give me sweat and I’ll give you equity and endless love”.

Concluded