Following from:
http://www.mxmindia.com/2014/09/the-distasteful-times-of-india/
http://www.mxmindia.com/2014/09/the-distasteful-times-of-india/
By Ranjona Banerji
The speculation is rife within the
media, fans and media commentators that the fight between Deepika Padukone and
some branches of The Times of India is manufactured: all good publicity to
promote a new movie. And all those who got taken in are just naive idiots
because both Bollywood stars and the entertainment media are utterly ruthless
at all times.
Certainly many controversies are
media stunts, carefully organised just before some film event or more often the
launch of a film. So one can understand the cynicism of Anant Rangaswami
of Firstpost.com when he raises these questions: http://www.firstpost.com/living/deepika-versus-bombay-times-may-real-war-1724717.html
But even if you assume that it was
all manufactured, the response that appeared on the front page of the Bombay
Times on September 22, written by its “editor Priya Gupta, you have to wonder
at the self-belief of a media house which puts up such pathetic writing and
worse logic in defence of its actions. You also have to wonder about the edit
page of The Times of India carrying a distinctly unfunny piece by “comedian”
Radhika Vaz slamming Deepika Padukone’s objections to The Times of India’s
official twitter handle focusing on her cleavage in a prurient manner.
To recap, the tweet read, “OMG:
Padukone’s cleavage show!”. Padukone responded saying yes, she was a woman,
yes, she had breasts and a cleavage and did they have a problem with that. She
also pointed out that this was India’s premier newspaper’s idea of news. After
this, TOI tweeted back saying it was a compliment and then deleted that answer
as social media outraged in its normal manner.
It is easy to say Padukone
over-reacted, that she is a Bollywood actress who has profited from the
objectification of women’s bodies and so on. The problem lies in the tone of
the first tweet. It was gratuitous, prurient and sleazy. The second tweet was
too clever by half.
But even more horrific and
distasteful was the response from Priya Gupta, who became editor of Bombay
Times via the HR and marketing departments and in keeping with the Bennett
Coleman policy of keeping all supplements under the grasp of Medianet.
Gupta’s defence mentions all
Padukone’s work where her body has been in display, dismisses her as someone
who started life as a liquor model, says that the Times Group disapproves of
moral policing and then provides several examples of how the moral police would
be really happy to bury Padukone in an underground cell. The edit page piece by
Vaz makes fun of Padukone’s anger with her cleavage being displayed.
A timely response from firstpost to
the Bombay Times piece: http://www.firstpost.com/living/its-2014-dear-toi-slut-shaming-deepika-padukone-over-cleavage-is-so-passe-1724023.html
Shivam Vij also dissected and
destroyed Gupta’s piece in scroll.in: http://scroll.in/article/680348/Times-of-India%E2%80%99s-rebuttal-to-Deepika-Padukone-is-regressive-and-shallow
I would argue that the group has
gathered around its official Twitter handle and decided to put Padukone in her
place. Newsminute.com has carried a story saying that several reporters working
for the Times in New Delhi have written to senior editors about their
discomfort with Gupta’s piece.
And here lies the problem with the
“it’s all fake” theory. If indeed this fight is a marketing ploy, could Bombay
Times have not concocted a more sophisticated response? Is a childish, badly
written and ridiculously argued defence full of bizarre references to the fact
that the newspaper does not carry photos of vaginas and nipples and with a big
red arrow pointing to a cleavage the best it could do? What about the unfunny
funny piece on the edit page?
It is definitely true that glamour
coverage will continue, that women and now increasingly men will be objectified,
that the media will be an intrusive and salacious supplicant, that the
glamorous will stoop to conquer, that sex will sell, that feminists and others
will occasionally object, that those in glass houses should not throw stones.
For all we know, Padukone may even dance at a Filmfare Awards night in the
future and win an award.
But the issue is not Padukone. The
issue is one of India’s oldest and biggest media houses and its road to
degradation in a number of ways. Medianet and paid news are bad enough. Its
descent into sleaze on its website is gross. Its defiant, “glamour sells, too
bad you suckers” is becoming tired and tiresome. But its need to justify itself
on something like this case now also makes it a sulky four-year-old.
The tragedy is that there are parts
of the Times of India as a newspaper which really work. It has excellent
institutional memory. It still has a strong stable of journalists. It excels at
a particular sort of blanket coverage of events. It may not break the greatest
stories but it remains solid on overall news. The hard work of all those
journalists is gradually being eroded by the behaviour of the management and
indeed those editors who buy into the management’s spiel.
Honestly, the newspaper has made
itself into a laughing stock with its over-the-top, misjudged, badly conceived,
distasteful, unsophisticated response to a foolish tweet someone on its payroll
put out. At the risk of being ageist, is this a sign of senility?
Ranjona Banerji is Consulting Editor,
MxMIndia. A senior journalist and columnist, she now lives in Dehradun. The
views expressed here are her own, though the editor endorses it. She can be
reached via Twitter at @ranjona
- See
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