To Vote or Not To Vote, THAT is No Longer the Question

March 31, 2009 by

I have been helping spread the word about my friend Vivek Gilani’s amazing portal, www.MumbaiVotes.com. It stuck me that being a journalist myself, I must write something about it and my perception of his project, from a third party perspective, as if i were a journalist. So, here it is. If you have any queries, please write to me at [email protected]. Please, if you like what you read below, do help spread the word. Vivek does not have millions to spare on advertising, only the best wishes of millions like you. .

Often, the most common platitude given to not vote, especially by the young urban, is that since all politicians are corrupt voting is like choosing the best from the worst. Of course, you couldn’t grill them about this assumption for two reasons: first you believe it yourself and second you have no means to prove otherwise. Now you do, at least in the city of Mumbai and that means is called: www.MumbaiVotes.com.

The people behind www.MumbaiVotes.com have compiled a whooping amount of information on 915 politicians (including all of Mumbai’s MPs, MLAs, Corporators, and Election Candidates) over 3600 newspaper articles, scores of video interviews, election manifestos and legislative records. It has enough and more material on every politician standing for this years elections for you to make up your mind to vote. Or if it be that bad – to justify not voting.

Vivek Gilani
That’s Vivek Gilani.

But before you start assuming that the portal intends to influence your decision in favour or against any candidate, its founder and political, environmental and social activist Vivek Gilani explains, “Whether a candidate is good or bad is a subjective judgement. We instead pursue objectivity and we merely seek to present to you what your elected candidate has done since s/he began the journey from candidate to Elected Representative.”

The generation before the advent of the internet, remember libraries, reference cards, and then, wait for a book i.e. wait for information. On the internet, the reference card has given way to a search box and the dead, one dimensional library has given way to digital texts, video and audio. It is total convergence. And both – its amazing application and effect – you can see in www.MumbaiVotes.com.

Go to the home page and use the map, search table or simply click on the photograph of your constituency’s MP to start exploring MumbaiVotes. Once on the ‘Results’ page, click on the name of the politician of interest and voila, there opens before you a Pandora’s box full of information with details of the politician (including landline and mobile numbers), his performance marks, articles on him, video and other details. All of these are available at the click of a button. The crispness, clarity and simplicity of it all, will simply bowl you over.

The greatest strength of the portal is however its analysis of politicians. All MPs, MLAs, Corporators and election candidates profiled in the portal, have been analyzed based on their performance in the context of their promises. Yes, one is bound to wonder about the methodology behind the same. This, developed by Vivek Gilani, an environmental engineer by profession, and a citizen rights and environmental activist, in conjunction with two PhDs in Media Studies and Civics & Indian Politics, is given on the site for anyone to check.

As a case in point, lets take the report card of three famous politicians: Govinda (film star truned politician), Priya Dutt (Film stars daughter turned politician) and Milind Deora (politicians son turned politician and no less than a film star in popularity being the youngest MP). Of the three, Govinda is the poorest. He has four red flags for attendance, two red flags for questions and debates and five red flags for Manifesto Promises Vs. Constituency Needs. If you were to consider him a school student and the different parameters as subjects, he’d fail with dying colours in all subjects often scoring less than 10 marks in most. Milind Deora and Priya Dutt, fare a little better. But even they do not come up all guns blazing. They fail in many subjects. Indeed, it is truly difficult to find one who at least passes in all.


ROCKSTAR CELEBRITIES AND/OR/BUT POLITICAL LOSERS?

The best thing about the site is that you can compare selected MPs. As an example, you can choose the candidates running for election from your area, tick them all and press the compare button and the flags show up i.e. their performance so far. You can easily choose the best from that, no more leaving you with an excuse not to vote.

And yet, before you begin accusing this of being a negative site, Vivek says, “Do look at the bigger picture too. There might be those who are performing exceptionally well but they would be marginalised within their party because of this very reason. While they had nothing to show earlier. Now they do. As an activist, you want to beat down a non-performing politician, MumbaiVotes will give you the fact. On the other hand, if you want to go the positive way and reward a performing one, MumbaiVotes will do that too. It’s totally up to you to use it.” We get the point: it is not just a record of politicians ineptitude but it can be a record of their brilliance as well. But our point is when we know that most politicians are inept anyways, it will de-facto become a record of their ineptitude. Ask Vivek this and he says, “That, then, is not the doing of MumbaiVotes.com. We are free, fair and unbiased in the truest sense. If a politician wants to have a good ranking, he better perform and the ranking will go up automatically.”

And that brings us to the weird bit about the portal, actually two weird bits. First is that despite its excruciating detail and massive database, it is absolutely free. And secondly, and this totally knocks one off, there is no advertisement or endorsement of any kind or type on the site. These factors, and the involvement of hundreds of volunteers who have given their time, efforts and even money, can perhaps justify it being called a grass root movement. Yet, whether you do call it one or not, you cannot deny two things: 1. The people concerned mean business. 2. They mean business so much, they are unwilling to jeopardise the movement by having sponsors give money and thus control what goes and what does not. These factors assure us of the veracity of the information in the site.

Yet, a venture like this would obviously require money. If for nothing than just for maintenance and hosting (considering the huge quantity of videos) and bandwidth (to go up with increasing number of hits). Mo Polamar, involved with the project as the Communication Panel Head, and also the JMD and founder of Palador Pictures (the company that brings to India venerable World Cinema Masterpieces), says, “The money come from the common masses. Whatever anyone wants to give, no matter how little, is welcome.”

There is a law that has been passed a few years back in the country, RTI, that empowers people to access any information from any government office. Eerily, MumbaiVotes seems just like that. And Mo Polamar rightly points out, “A democracy is a government that is for, of and by the people. This means, every piece of information should be public property. But it is not. The RTI act challenged this status quo and won. MumbaiVotes takes the spirit of RTI and contextualizes available data on our politicians and their promises. No longer can they shirk accountability because the account of their deeds and misdeeds is noted on MumbaiVotes.com for the world to see and to haunt them forever.”

There is no doubt that like with its extensive information, www.MumbaiVotes.com, as its Press Release suggests, becomes a must visit portal for political studies students, researchers, analysts, journalists, social activist and any awakened individual who wants to know and then to make a difference. Indeed, imagine what a journalist can do. He is passing by a road and sees that a road full of potholes. He knows the area and so he logs on to MumbaiVotes.com, checks out the constituency and the MP and corporator for it check out their numbers and call them straight. Even you, just as a citizen who wants to know what they are up to and want to call up Govinda, Milind Deora or Priya Dutt, go check out their mobile numbers on the site, and make the call.

One can imagine how political parties, baying for each others blood, would use the site too. When they need to sling mud at an opposing candidate or politician, they now know where to go and dig out all the dirt. And no matter who digs out the dirt, the winners are always the same: the common man of Mumbai and democracy in the country.

Hence, it is a real pity there isnt one say, DelhiVotes.com, or KolkataVotes.com, or Bangalore Votes.com, or ChennaiVotes.com. It would have been interesting if they were also available and that besides the 6 constituency under scanner, all the 500 plus constituencies of the country were so. But, they are not, and we have two choices, one is to look at the glass half empty, or as Vivek does, look at the mug full of water that can fill the rest of the glass: “MumbaiVotes.com took Five years of conceptualisation and adaptation, and over a year of collation of data, and hundreds of volunteers from all walks of life. And my intention was to show that this is possible. I did it for Mumbai since I AM from Mumbai. There is a template made now. It will be easier to replicate the model. Now let others take up the mantle for every little town and village in India. Let this be a national movement. Yes, it will take in time and it will take in resources. But I have no doubt, we have both. The only question to ask is, do we have the WILL.”

Do we, indeed?

Mumbai Votes At Wikipedia.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , ,

Business school flap a 'breakout moment' for Indian blogosphere

October 26, 2005 by

In India, you might think that if you buy enough newspaper ads, those same newspapers won’t bother to check the claims you make in those ads. The papers wouldn’t want to lose ad money, right? But that old equation is changing, thanks to one scrappy youth magazine called JAM and the collective investigative strength of the Indian blogosphere.

It all started June 15, when JAM ran an in-depth report debunking the advertised claims of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), a private business school that had spent more than $1 million in ads for its MBA program in May 2005. JAM found that IIPM had inflated claims about placing all of its students in jobs; having teachers from Harvard, Columbia and Yale; and luxurious extras such as swimming pools, mini golf and Wi-Fi towers.

Then blogger Gaurav Sabnis, an IBM salesman based in Mumbai, linked to the JAM article on Aug. 5 with a post titled, “The fraud that is IIPM.” Perhaps the story would have died right there, but then IIPM made a tactical error by sending Sabnis a legal notice by e-mail on Oct. 4.

“The articles have caused unfathomable damage to the reputation of IIPM and to its various operational areas,” the e-mail read. “The articles further have affected innumerable future operations of IIPM. We have legally notarized and logged all the releases and are sending you this e-mail to you as the first notice of proposed legal, judicial and criminal action against you that has already been approved & cleared by the Post Graduate Fellow Programme committee at IIPM.”

While Sabnis at first found the whole legal threat funny, he wasn’t laughing when his boss at IBM told him that IIPM was putting pressure on IBM (which sells laptops to IIPM) to get Sabnis to delete the blog posts. Plus, IIPM told IBM that its students were planning to burn their IBM laptops in protest. Sabnis quickly decided to quit his job at IBM to spare the company the PR nightmare.

Meanwhile, IIPM served similar legal notices to JAM magazine and another blogger who had written about the school, Varna Sriraman. The furor in the Indian blogosphere — where bloggers refused to delete any posts — finally caught the attention of the mainstream Indian media, which then covered IIPM’s inflated claims.

“It looks like a breakout moment [for Indian bloggers] to me,” said Peter Griffin, a communications consultant and blogger in Mumbai. “With this case, the ingredients were just right. Popular bloggers being targeted using some very heavy-handed methods by an institution that’s not exactly highly regarded, a person at the head of that institution who doesn’t command any respect, the popular bloggers being respected by their peers … and, most important, the issue of freedom of expression at the center of it all — a cause that blogs, by definition, will support.”

Blogs make a difference

In fact, the Indian blogosphere, cheered on by American counterparts such as InstaPundit, rallied to the defense of JAM magazine, Sabnis and Sriraman — while also putting IIPM further under the microscope. With some ad hoc investigative work by bloggers such as Curious Gawker and Transmogrifier, the authenticity of IIPM’s MBA degrees were called into question.

Blogger Thalassa Mikra found that IIPM founder Dr. Malay Chaudhuri had lied on the educational backgrounder he filed when he ran for public office. Mikra discovered that Chaudhuri claimed in the file that he went to the Berlin School of Economics in the 1960s, even though that school was only founded in 1971.

The updates were coming fast and furious at that point. Bloggers such as Amit Varma and DesiPundit ran massive posts with links to all the new information.

“This entire matter has driven home the point that bloggers can help enforce accountability in public life, and that no one — whether they be the government, companies or even bloggers themselves — can get away with deception,” Varma told me via e-mail. “That is a fantastic thing. It has also made Indian bloggers more aware of the power they wield, and the ability they have to disseminate information quickly. We’ve seen this at different times in different ways, like during the tsunami, for example.”

In December 2004, Indian bloggers such as Varma and Griffin covered the effects of the Southeast Asian tsunami, and they used the lauded Tsunami Help group blog as a template for the more recent South Asia Quake Help blog focused on the Oct. 8 earthquake in Pakistan. Today, Oct. 26, happens to be Blog Quake Day, with DesiPundit calling on bloggers around the world to mention the Pakistan quake and link to charities that support relief efforts.

While Indian bloggers also rallied to support Mediaah blogger and journalist Pradyuman Maheshwari last March against a legal threat from the Times of India, Maheshwari decided it wasn’t worth fighting for and pulled the plug on his popular blog.

IIPM’s overreaction

But the legal threats from IIPM did nothing to cow bloggers or JAM Magazine. Rashmi Bansal, the editor and publisher of JAM and a blogger as well, told me via e-mail that IIPM’s Chaudhuri and the school’s dean A. Sandeep showed up at JAM’s offices to accuse them of yellow journalism. After the visit, JAM received a 17-page legal notice threatening to sue JAM for defamation unless IIPM received a retraction and apology.

Amit Saxena, head of corporate communications for IIPM, sent me a statement that tried to deflect the criticism of JAM and bloggers, and accused the latter of a slant toward the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), a more respected and established system of business schools.

“We are stunned as to how the most pampered students of India (i.e. from the IIM) suffer from so much inferiority complex from us that given the first opportunity to pen something (be it [former] IIM students like Rashmi Bansal or Gaurav Sabnis, and all other IIM students on the Net and other media), they stoop down so low as to write relentless lies and spread baseless rumors about IIPM,” the statement read, in part. “But beyond a point IIPM can’t allow these kinds of shallow rumors mongering to go on and had to take an action.”

But Saxena would not discuss the details of the JAM expose, and IIPM has never explained discrepancies with its ads and the information unearthed by journalists and bloggers. Instead, IIPM has served legal notices, and a plethora of nameless blogs, allegedly by IIPM alumni, have sprouted up overnight defending IIPM and smearing the bloggers.

“None of this does IIPM the slightest bit of credit, nor does it enhance its reputation,” wrote Kanika Datta in Business Standard, India’s leading business daily. “If it wants to defend itself with dignity and credibility, the institution would do well to set up a blog of its own rebutting the facts in the JAM piece and publicly dissociating itself from the more injudicious comments of its enthusiastic alumni. The Net is increasingly becoming a pain point for corporations, especially large multinationals in controversial businesses. If there is a larger lesson for them in this incident, it is how not to deal with negative stories.”

Instead, the scrutiny of bloggers helped get the notice of mainstream media, who then piled on with their own reporting. CNBC-TV18 — a joint venture of CNBC and Indian TV18 — ran a story on Oct. 24 stating that IIPM did not have approval from the Indian government’s University Grants Commission (UGC) to offer an MBA.

“There is no private institution which is not recognized by UGC or which is not a part of a university, [that] can offer an MBA program,” V N Rajshekharan Pillai, acting director of the UGC, told CNBC-TV18. “That is the rule of the land. I do not know how exactly they call it an MBA program. This institution has not approached the UGC, it is not a university. It is not an affiliated institute of any university from their advertisement.”

Sabnis, the blogger who quit his IBM job, told me he is weighing various new job offers. He said that IIPM has made a few changes to their ads since the JAM story.

“I expect them to keep making changes because now there is literally an army of bloggers exposing lies of IIPM,” Sabnis said. “Just today, I got an e-mail from a blogger who mailed Philip Koetler, the father of modern marketing. IIPM uses his name in their ads. The blogger made Koetler aware of this and asked if he endorsed IIPM. Koetler replied saying that the institute shouldn’t be using his name in the ads. As such facts are unearthed and blogged about, IIPM will be forced to alter its ads.”

Bloggers + MSM = better media?

The story of IIPM and its battle with JAM and Indian bloggers follows a familiar trajectory here in the U.S.: There’s a story in a smallish magazine, picked up and magnified by bloggers, then picked up and magnified by the mainstream media (MSM). This snowball effect has bloggers exulting, and the MSM taking bloggers much more seriously.

S. Karat is a freelance journalist in New Delhi who writes the ContentSutra blog, a spinoff from PaidContent.org that covers digital media in India. Karat told me IIPM made a big mistake taking on bloggers.

“The bottom line is Indian bloggers have arrived,” Karat said via e-mail. “They have become strong opinion makers. Indian mainstream media has failed to take up the issue — one reason is that IIPM is a big advertiser and the mainline media is an interested party there. But they forget that readers are their first priority and not advertisers.”

While mainstream publications like The Hindustan Times and Businessworld have given bloggers credit in shining the light on IIPM, not everyone is happy with the bloggers’ methods.

Sajan Venniyoor wrote on the media watchdog site The Hoot that Sabnis went over the line in his blog post — and should use the same journalistic standards as the MSM.

“If blogs are to be taken seriously as an alternative medium, they should measure up to the standards of accountability and reliability of the mainstream media that the bloggers so deplore,” Venniyoor wrote. “Just because you are the underdog does not mean that you are always right.”

And though some in the Indian MSM are taking bloggers more seriously now, at least one mainstream journalist is not convinced.

T.R. Vivek wrote an in-depth story for Outlook India on the IIPM flap, even finding that the bloggers were on the right side of the law. But when describing Indian bloggers, Vivek struck a low blow.

“The Indian blogging community (or blogosphere, as it likes to call itself) is essentially a bitchy, self-indulgent and an almost incestuous network comprising journalists, wannabe-writers and a massive army of geeks who give vent to their creative ambitions on the Internet,” Vivek wrote. “Given that the average blogger-age is 25 years, it’s clear bloggers love to indulge in hearty name-calling and taking college-style potshots at others. This is probably why some of them get into trouble.”

Perhaps, but Vivek could be accused of taking the same type of potshot just within that paragraph. And in the final analysis, bloggers were the ones — along with JAM magazine — to stand up to a big institution without backing down.

“There are several issues that mainstream media doesn’t go after with as much enthusiasm as it should,” Sabnis told me. “Reasons can be manifold — business interests, the ‘sexiness’ of the story, effort involved, potential audience, etc. Bloggers, however, are not bound by any such constraints. They have no editors and no marketing team to answer to. Thus bloggers can pursue such issues with a lot more conviction. They can bring such issues to the notice of the mainstream media much more effectively.”

* * *

More on the IIPM brouhaha

India: Defending Freedom of Speech
Global Voices Online

Bloggers join hands against B-school
Express News Service

Blogs come of age: IIPM comes under fire
News Today

Can bloggers take on the role of public regulators?
DNA India

Row over IIPM blogs
NDTV

Breaking the Girl: IIPM’s Virtual Thugs Bully Rashmi Bansal
Sepia Mutiny blog

IIPM issues notice in ‘interest of IIPM and Planman fraternity’
Scribbler on the Net blog

Filed Under: Reporting Tagged With: , ,

Indian media blog shuts down after legal threats from Times of India

March 15, 2005 by

In India, a flourishing business for print media doesn’t translate to flourishing media criticism. As of March 2003, the Registrar of Newspapers for India reported there were 55,780 newspapers in the subcontinent, with 3,820 new newspapers registered in the previous year and 23 percent growth in overall circulation. And the Times of India, owned by the Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd., is the king of English-language newspapers with a circulation north of 2 million and readership of over 7.4 million people, according to Wikipedia.

But along with that success has come a dumbing down of the news as large mega-media corporations have gained control of newspapers — and have even invested in each other’s stock. So when one of the few noted media critics, Pradyuman Maheshwari, criticized the Times of India on his Mediaah Weblog recently, the Times looked to squash him with a seven-page legal threat for libel. The threat worked, and Maheshwari decided to close his site, as he has a day job running the daily Maharashtra Herald in Pune and didn’t have the resources to fight back.

Maheshwari, 39, started the blog in July 2003, as a no-holds-barred look at the Indian media business, complete with cheeky commentary and gossip and rumors. His original idea was to create a Poynter-like institute in India that would provide training for mid-career journalists. While the blog became popular in the media business, with a readership around 8,000, his own business aspirations for it flamed out. He took a job heading up the Herald in early 2003 and shut the blog down to concentrate on his job.

“The site didn’t work for me financially,” Maheshwari told me. “I thought I would be able to monetize it, but couldn’t, maybe because it was ahead of its time, or maybe I was being too idealistic. I wasn’t willing to accept money and advertising from media companies because I thought that would influence me.”

After a year of downtime, Maheshwari started the blog up again in January 2004 and received his first legal threat from the Times of India after a posting about the newspaper making a deal with Reuters related to TV. Even though another newspaper picked up the same story, Maheshwari was unwilling to fight and took down the posting and apologized. But even the apology upset the Times, and they told him to take it down so there wasn’t a backlash against the paper.

Then on March 7, he received a much longer legal notice, asking him to remove 19 blog posts related to the Times, or the company would take legal action. Maheshwari says much of what upset the Times was his criticism of its MediaNet initiative where businesses can actually buy photos and profile stories in the Times’ editorial section — what it calls “edvertorials.”

Almost all my calls and e-mails to the Times of India were ignored. I talked to its executive director, Ravi Dhariwal, who said he had “very little knowledge” of the legal letter against Mediaah, though he had heard of the Weblog and had read it.

“I don’t think it’s a piece of journalistic caliber,” Dhariwal said. “But I’m not here to express my point of view. You wanted to know some facts about the legal notice, and I’m not one to know.”

The legal notice came from a Delhi lawyer named K.K. Manan, who would only confirm to me that he had sent the legal papers. “I’m not going to talk to you people on the telephone,” was all he would say before hanging up on the transatlantic call. The legal notice makes very clear threats against Maheshwari.

“You are constantly engaged in criminal conspiracy against my Client, its employees, and business which has resulted in grave harm and loss of reputation to my client and its employees,” reads the legal notice in part, under Manan’s name. “It is clear that published material is injurious to the reputation of my client, which is done intentionally with ulterior motives or done in criminal conspiracy with someone as a proxy war. My Client reserves its right to take any criminal or civil legal action as it may be advised …”

Indian blogosphere springs to action

While Maheshwari has been reluctant to take on the Times in court, the Indian blogosphere hasn’t been quite so shy. One anonymous blogger quickly set up Mediaha, a blog that contains the 19 blog posts in question (which Maheshwari had taken down), as well as the seven-page legal notice from the Times.

One blogger, Sruthijith K K, a student who works at a public policy think tank in Delhi, launched a blog to follow the Mediaah/Times battle, while starting an online petition that quickly garnered 200-plus signatures. And another blogger, who goes by the online name Quetzal, ran a protest post on his blog, which is ironically hosted by the Times itself on its blog-hosting service O3.

“The success of [The Times’] case depends wholly on the hope that Maheshwari will not fight back against a gargantuan media conglomerate,” said Rohit Gupta, a freelance writer and engineer in Mumbai. “That’s where the Times of India reveals its ignorance of changing times and the nature of the blogosphere. Maheshwari does not need to fight this himself — this concerns the freedom of all bloggers from Indian origin, so we will fight the battle for him.”

Gupta has experience rallying the blogosphere during the tsunami disaster, by helping set up the South-east Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog. He has hopes that the Indian blogosphere can rattle the cages for change in the media business there.

“Maybe it’s premature, but if this goes where I think it’s going, it should go down in history as ‘The Great Indian Blog Mutiny,'” Gupta told me via e-mail. “The Times of India has simply shown how far they’ve come from being a respectable newspaper to being a common school bully. If bloggers can collaborate to provide humanitarian assistance for the greatest natural disaster the living world has seen, they can certainly tackle the Times of India, a man-made ethical disaster.”

While the Indian blogosphere has had global success helping cover the tsunami, it doesn’t have the domestic media clout of the bloggers in the U.S.

“In the U.S., bloggers are a powerful community, and you wouldn’t want to take them on,” Maheshwari said. “Here, the bloggers are a very small community, and people like the Times of India will take them on. It will take some time. We don’t have an association to back us up.”

Peter Griffin, a freelance writer in Mumbai, contributes to a prominent group media blog, Chiens Sans Frontieres (C*S*F), which has kept the Times’ feet to the fire over the Mediaah shutdown. Griffin told me that the Indian media has been slow to grasp the blogosphere and its potential to disrupt business as usual there.

“I think it’s pretty sad that an organization like the Times, one whose purpose is to provide information and opinion, should seek to suppress opinions it doesn’t like,” Griffin said via e-mail. “If they think that the blogosphere will let something like this go by without raising a stink, then they’re seriously underestimating the power of the collective. On the other hand, if they think a blog with a small subscriber base can seriously threaten an organization that is the size of the Times and its group, then it’s almost comical. They look pretty much like an elephant running away from a mouse.”

[Read my entire e-mail interview with Griffin on his blog here.]

The sad state of media criticism

While Indians are generally a gregarious people who read the news voraciously and have plenty of opinions, the idea of a media critic — especially of the print media — hasn’t caught on. Maheshwari figures there are only a handful of print media critics in the entire country, despite the tens of thousands of newspapers.

“While there are many seasoned journalists in India, there aren’t many people who have chosen to critique media,” he told me. “Being a media critic requires you to take on other media entities, which may find a person out of favor of a potential employer or friend. Publications possibly think that it’s not good to write a negative story about a rival … that it wouldn’t be considered in good taste.”

Maheshwari says he has worked in the media for 19 years, with more than 10 as a media critic. He points to Sevanti Ninan, who runs non-profit site The Hoot under the auspices of the Media Foundation, as one of the other top media critics. Ninan has had trouble keeping the site funded and recently ran another appeal for donations. She told me Indian media houses are not keen on criticism.

“The print media here has a very thin skin,” she said via e-mail. “Newspaper proprietors are wary of letting their staff write about other newspapers, in case the scrutiny is turned on them too. I write a regular newspaper column on all media including print, but a regular media column on the print media is pretty much non-existent. Every paper however carries critiques on television. … I started The Hoot four years ago primarily because newspapers and TV were so reluctant to carry media criticism.”

In a recent report on the Mediaah brouhaha on The Hoot, Ninan said that Maheshwari’s writing was “gossipy and irreverent” but that defamation could be alleged because he was targeting the Times “almost every single day.” The problem for Mediaah, according to Ninan, is that this is not a national issue such as the RatherGate phenomenon that dealt with CBS and questionable documents related to President Bush’s guard service.

“If a blog is raising an issue of national importance and providing evidence to go with it, the mainstream media will pick it up,” Ninan wrote. “But if it is a matter primarily concerning a media house with no larger implications, in India the media will not take on other media, no matter what. That has been Maheshwari’s misfortune.”

The writer/engineer Gupta also had the misfortune of doing media criticism of his own newspaper.

“Most of the major Indian media companies are bedfellows of each other,” Gupta said. “I was fired for voicing my opinion of Mid-Day, while being a columnist for Mid-Day. Who will want to follow my example? Blogs are our only outlet. This is why C*S*F was created, to protect freedom of expression.”

Many people believe the blogosphere nullified the old saying from A.J. Liebling, “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.” However, Ninan sees a new cost for that freedom.

“The thing about free speech though, is that it does not come for free,” she wrote. “Its price, at the very least, is a lawyer’s fees. Pradyuman Maheshwari was offering no-holds-barred commentary on the media. If you are no-holds-barred, it stands to reason, does it not, that the guy you are targeting will also be no-holds-barred? You have to be prepared for that and cover your flanks.”

End game or a new beginning?

If Maheshwari had a fault in his writing, it’s that he was trying to please both his audience with saucy writing and the offended media houses with apologies and backpedaling. At one point, he started using asterisks in his writing to try to hide what he was talking about, in a weak attempt to prevent litigation. The legal papers from the Times even make reference to this style, saying “you are in the habit of doing malicious campaign against various media houses and when they object you immediately apologize to soften their anger.”

Indeed, Maheshwari wavered on whether to shut the site and went through each of his options in minute detail on his blog. Plus, he simultaneously told me that he wasn’t shutting the site out of concern for his day job as editor, but then said he didn’t want me to mention his employer in my article.

One thing is certain, though. Maheshwari will not be away from blogs for long. He plans to make a comeback, with the hope that he’ll have the backing of an organization. The blogger had applied to the Media Bloggers Association (MBA) just before his legal entanglement and will become a full member as of today. Robert Cox, co-founder of the MBA, told me he wasn’t familiar with Indian law but will provide what support he can to Mediaah.

“The MBA has agreed to assist Mediaah in so far as that is possible from New York to Bombay,” Cox said via e-mail. “The Times of India v. Mediaah matter reflects a pattern we have seen here in the United States where media companies appear to be first in line to use bully-boy tactics disguised as legal concerns to threaten and intimidate bloggers. [It mirrors] my own experience with New York Times attempting to shut down The National Debate blog over a parody last year and more recently a case where an MBA member, Michael Bates, has been threatened by his local paper, The Tulsa World, for the ‘crimes’ of linking to pages on their public site and quoting World articles in his blog posts.”

Following legal advice, Maheshwari likes his odds better as part of an organization or group instead of having to face the Times of India alone.

“What I plan to do is set up a Web site now in the name of an organization instead of just my name,” Maheshwari said. “The [legal] protection is slightly better for an organization than for an individual. But what I definitely did not want to do was delete those 19 posts or apologize for that. A lot of people told me in the past that I should not apologize, and I don’t see why I should apologize for something that I see as honest criticism and constructive criticism.”

As for restarting Mediaah, he said that would only happen if the Times withdrew its legal threats.

“I was extremely upset and distressed about what happened,” Maheshwari said. “Because this is just a labor of love, it is a lot more distressing. It’s good to see so many people are championing the cause, but I also don’t want to be associated with that because I don’t want to be seen as instigating against the Times of India. I just want to be seen as an honest critic of the media, having spent my whole working life in this business. I just try to get on with my life.”

* * * * *

In Their Own Words
A sampling of thoughts on the Mediaah shutdown

On being fair to the Times:

“I appreciate that criticism should have its limits. But in my case, being a journalist and being an editor, there are people that will testify that I was fair in my criticism, and I was willing to put my name on it. I had the most to lose. I have a full day job. It’s not like I have a university funding me, so I have the most at stake. The objective was very noble, and the blog was getting very popular, so they were trying to silence me.” — Pradyuman Maheshwari, Mediaah blog proprietor, interview with OJR

The Times as Saddam:

“The Times of India has something of a Saddam Hussein hold on the Indian media here. I wouldn’t say they’re Saddam Hussein, but they are quite feared, and nobody wants to take them on. I always focused on issues and didn’t want Mediaah to become a scandal sheet, and because I work at a newspaper, I know that if a newspaper makes a big mistake, I know what it is. I’m just taking issues, larger policy issues, but it’s not nitpicking.” — Pradyuman Maheshwari, interview with OJR

On the democratization of media:

“I respect the Times of India for the fact that they have always adapted to new technologies, new ideas and attitudes. I hope they see and accept today’s reality that media has been democratized. Today everybody has a way to let others know their opinion and make it count at very low costs. … Also they would withdraw it if they realized that there is nothing they can do about someone who publishes on a free platform anonymously. Such actions will only motivate such people further.” — Sruthijith K K, student and blogger who set up petition in support of Mediaah

On Mediaah’s possible agendas:

“Now that the last prayers are being said for Mediaah.com, we have a word of advice for aspiring media commentators. Do not think that all is fair in media wars. Do not put out unsubstantiated stories. Do not be driven by agendas and prejudices. Do not target any one particular company/group/person. Rumours and masala are good to hear and pass around, but not good enough to put in the public domain. Apologizing for something which was genuinely wrong is correct and gentlemanly. Retracting that apology citing popular support is not. … Above all, stand by truth, not just your own story.” — Dances with Shadows, anonymous online journalist who criticized Maheshwari

On the double standard at the Times:

“While I think Pradyuman’s conclusions on some of [the blog posts] are a tad harsh, and I also have issues with his tone of voice, he certainly is well within his rights as a critic to come to those conclusions, and his tone of voice is his privilege to choose. Let me put it this way. If an actor or director thought the Times of India’s movie critic was being unduly harsh, would s/he sue the Times? If the Times’ literary critic savaged Salman Rushdie’s next book, would Mr. Rushdie have a case for slander against the Times? Would a court look at such lawsuits seriously?” — Peter Griffin, freelance writer and blogger in Mumbai

On the lack of media criticism in India:

“In Pakistan, which is a dictatorship, you can’t criticize the government but you can criticize the media. In India, which is a flourishing democratic economy, you can criticise the government – but not the media. As a result of prosperity, the guardians of our freedom of expression have become cheap entertainment portals and spin doctors.” — Rohit Gupta, freelance writer and engineer in Mumbai

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