Vir vs Mint

After a couple of strange, and unexpected, text messages today, I went over to presstalkto find that K had discovered Vir Sanghvi’s new website and, more specifically, two articles on the website dealing with an issue that has left me feeling somewhat distressed.

In the most recent, Vir says that he’s going to stop writing his regular column for Mint’s Saturday newspaper, after the newspaper’s editor decided to drop a piece he had written for the paper.

I will not write for a publication that censors its columnists and denies them the right to free speech while writing long, impassioned pieces about the freedom to criticize others from the Prime Minister downwards. All of us exhibit double standards to some degree. But Mint’s hypocrisy takes my breath away.

The dispute is over a column I wrote on business journalism in the aftermath of the Satyam scandal. I wrote about business journalism in general and made specific references to my one brush with business journalists during my brief, ill-fated time with News X.

While I praised some organizations (Business Standard, Exchange4Media etc.) I was critical of Mint, which had easily the worst coverage of that episode and of INX TV in general.

The column that wasn’t carried is also available on Vir’s website. In it, Vir writes about Satyam and his experience with business journalists as an object of coverage during the INX meltdown last year. He is particularly scathing about the coverage in Mint:

Easily the worst was Mint — ironic because I am a columnist — which managed to get basic details wrong, running biased and inaccurate reports and then following them up with a series of wildly speculative (always attributed to “a source close to the situation”) stories which (long after I had left and other NewsX issues were being featured) nearly always demonstrated a total misunderstanding of the situation.

As Mint is not a newspaper that carries much news and specializes in thoughtful, analytical reports, these lapses were surprising. One theory is that the paper likes running Stardust-type media-gossip stores which are either of no consequence (the Delhi Press Club elections ) or just wrong (Pradeep Guha to join Big TV), in the hope that people will talk about them. When NewX was eventually sold, Mint which had identified the wrong suitors, failed again as Exchange4Media scooped the story.

The larger point he was trying to make however has now got lost — Raju is a shifty shyster and the business press didn’t catch on to him, though they did come vociferously against the Satyam-Maytas deal that led to the whole house of cards collapsing.

In a country where the newsstand price of a newspaper or magazine is a pittance, it isn’t surprising at all that various interests often dictate the level of aggression with which business reporters operate. While Vir doesn’t accuse Mint of pandering to advertisers, he does accuse the paper of shoddy reporting on the INX mess.

If I remember correctly, the first few stories were a little one sided, while the later stories were more complete. But then, there’s really no point in my saying so — I was peripherally involved and can be accused of nursing a bias.

Anyway, Vir has now come out strongly against the newspaper’s decision, and the new managing editor Sukumar Ranganathan.

I believe that the ability to carry criticism of yourself is the mark of a competent editor and a confident publication.

Sadly, the new editor of Mint – after Raju’s departure – does not appear to share this view. He refused to carry the article.

This is entirely his prerogative and I respect that.

But I have to say that his attitude puzzles me. Almost from the time it was launched, Mint has taken pride in its ability to write what it likes about anybody including the HT and its owners. Barely a month has gone by without the paper taking some kind of dig at the HT (most recently, it said that the campaign for the HT Leadership Summit was the turkey of the month, a rather cruel swipe at my friend Rajiv Verma who had committed crores of the HT’s money to this turkey).

As some of you may know, I worked with Vir at INX (where he knew me) and before that at the Hindustan Times (where I don’t think he knew I existed :). I have always had a tremendous amount of respect for him, and have been accused of being a loyalist — I was fired from INX immediately after he left.

After INX, I spent around six months in the Hindustan Times Group as part of a team that set up the online video desk for Mint. While I didn’t report to Sukumar, I worked with him on a daily basis and got to know him as well as one can in the brief time I was there. And I have to say I liked him.

I guess that’s why it distresses me to say that I can’t understand why the column was pulled.

The whole idea of having someone on as a columnist is that you basically give the person column space and leave it up to him (or her) to write whatever they want to. You don’t have to like what they have to say. In fact, this is why a number of newspapers prefer to separate internal responsibility for opinion and news entirely, so the person responsible for news is in no way accountable for the opinion pieces in a newspaper.

Anyway, I’ve always been led to believe that the one thing you never do is drop a column. If you feel you have to, you drop the columnist entirely.

If Sukumar believed that Vir’s column was irresponsible, or biased, or just plain wrong, the only option he really had was writing an editorial in defence of Mint.

As a daily reader of Mint, I have to come to expect a level of irreverence from the paper. And I’ve always found it refreshing that the paper takes pride in stating its position clearly, addressing errors prominently, and encouraging an intelligent discourse. I guess all I can do is wait for Mint’s response.

Recovered from the site’s WordPress archive, where it was published on 2009-01-21.