The I&B Ministry, from 2006 till July 14, 2009, issued 42 notices to various television channels (news and general entertainment) for airing violent and sexually explicit content. The maximum penalty awarded to a channel for airing content that violates the broadcasting laws is a ban of two months. AXN channel was banned in India from 17.1.2007 to 28.2.2007 for telecasting a programme called World's Sexiest Advertisements. Similarly, FTV was banned for two months after the order of 29.3.2007 for showing a programme called Midnight Hot.
Tracing India with Manoj
Watch the interesting story of Manoj Kewalramani, who left a cushy job of a senior news producer with an English news channel, to travel the length and breadth of India and talk to the STARS of Loksabha Polls 2009 - "The Indian Electorate".
Calling upon feudal custodians of Indian morality
A bunch of self-styled guardians force themselves in a posh city pub and thrash women in the name of upholding our much-maligned and much-abused traditional Indian moral values. The incident portends the ominous truth that these are grave times indeed. A frenzied media went haywire in the aftermath of the ugly attack as social activists and ministers alike ranted against what they described as the 'Talibanisation of India'.
The choice we make…
Over the past two months, none of us has remained insulated from the public discourse that has ranged from faint-hearted defeatism accepting a rotting order to boisterous and repetitive calls seeking "action" and "change." These words, however, are deceptive devices; they invoke the images of a euphoric, bright destiny but fail to vanquish the darkness along the road that has to be endured.
State machinery succeeded in deflecting public anger from political class to TV media
Let the Government not forget that in Mumbai-like situation where the terrorists are in their aggressive best and the Government might in its fiercest form, the media presence cannot be blocked in any healthy democracy. And there were no operational details that we were privy to. We had disseminated only that which was in public gaze and was most obvious.
Media witch-hunt for the Obama moment!
As much as Barack Obama's win has fascinated India, the media has merely focused on one fact – his race and therefore so-called "minority" status. That has launched, with incredulous rancor, the hunt for a Bhartiya Obama who would be the winner of the single-greatest five-yearly reality TV event.