Trysts with MSM - Part 15: The Hindu & China

MSM stands for Main Stream Media.

Every year, The Hindu has editorials on ALL Nobel Prize winners. Every year. On all 6 categories. This year, it did not have an editorial for the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

This year, the prize was awarded to imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China". The absence of any editorial on this man was very mysterious. So, on twitter, I set about asking three people from The Hindu.

One is their China correspondent - Ananth Krishnan, who hasn't responded to my query as to why there was no editorial. When fellow bloggers at CBCNN asked him ( on lack of coverage I guess), he provided them with three links of his coverage. And that coverage did give us information on who this man is, what he did etc. However, that still never answered why there was no editorial in the newspaper.

Second one was Siddarth Varadarajan, Associate Editor of The Hindu.

On November 4, he replies like this (supposed humour!): @ssudhirkumar I wrote another edit in liu of him! [on why I didn't write anything on the Nobel peace prize winner 2010]

However, the question was never why "he" did not write anything on Liu. The question was why there was no editorial. And so I persisted with the question :)

On Dec.11 (a day after Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, though he was not physically present to receive it), Siddarth replies to me:

@ssudhirkumar FYI Hindu leads with Liu Nobel today

He was referring to their front page coverage of the award ceremony. Well, that still did not answer the question as why there was no editorial on it ! Asked him again, but never got an answer. The attempt to wash away the actual question with sundry replies did not come as a surprise though.

The third person is the Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, N.Ram. The same question was being asked, whenever he came online :) And late last week, he sends a

Direct Message (a DM is not seen on a public timeline. I don't know why he had to send this as a private message):

Because we're not all-knowing and don't/can't write editorials on every subject; and our edit writers didn't know enough of the background.

Yes - you read it right folks. The Editor in Chief of The Hindu says that they don't/can't write editorials on every subject! And they didn't know enough of background, when their own correspondent dished out three articles on this subject !! Worse, The Hindu did not deem it fit to even condemn the total lack of coverage in the Chinese media. It did not find it fit enough to condemn the Chinese government's decision to black out all international channels that were broadcasting the news.

That The Hindu is Left leaning is no secret (and this is not some silly bloggers talking - even Rajdeep Sardesai recently challenged N.Ram to write an anti-left piece!). Such actions only serve as proof!