“Police have stormed the Supreme Court.” “The Chief Justice has been sacked!” “Aitezaz Ahsan has been arrested and Asma Jahangir placed under house arrest.” Pakistanis heard the news, not from their own television channels, but from callers in various parts of the world.

Communication technologies are evolving at such a furious pace that it is difficult to fathom their multidimensional parameters in the near future. They touch our lives in innumerable ways and enhance our lifestyle. The possibilities are endless, but so are the dangers that lurk in the horizon. So these technologies have to be handled with care and caution.

It is with great pleasure that I participate in this function to present the International Press Institute India Award, 2007 for excellence in Journalism. The Award is made in recognition of an outstanding work done by an Indian News Organisation or an individual journalist

It is an honour and a privilege for me to accept this coveted award on behalf of the Outlook Group. I would like to especially congratulate Saikat Datta, our correspondent, and Ajith Pillai, his editor. Saikat pursued this story for over six months and putting it together was like a roller coaster ride for all of us.

It is indeed a little difficult to see them being treated with equanimity in the press. Whenever and wherever they are written about, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) provoke extreme reactions. But love them or hate them, it is difficult not to marvel at the way they employ media for their own purposes.

Where established leaders struggle to maintain their presence in Lok Sabha, KP Srivastava has been a regular feature in the House for three decades. He shares his wisdom and gold mine of anecdotes with Vidura.

When Mid Day’s journalists were sentenced recently by a court for writing about the judiciary, it made news and there was much discussion on the importance of press

It is often thought that people who take up the ‘science’ stream in academia are generally of the cut and dried, unimaginative type – only surpassed in this perhaps by those taking up the ‘commerce’ stream.

The art of publicity seeking is best utilised when there is an election at hand, when one candidate is all set to take on the other with their respective ‘dirty tricks departments’.

“Those were the days when Altaf Gauhar, in the office of the Central Information Secretary, was the virtual ‘Editor-in-Chief’ of 1,597 dailies, weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies and other periodicals, and the regional PID officials were the ‘resident editors’ of the papers in their jurisdiction.

From being the liberal President under whom Pakistan’s independent electronic media was born and has flourished, Pervez Musharraf is now seen only as the military general who has imposed emergency rule on November 3 and suspended the Constitution and the independent judiciary.

Should media depict the image of a young girl, who has been stripped by some unruly youths in a city street in broad daylight? More surprisingly, should the picture of the naked girl, of course blurring some portions of it, be printed in the front page of daily newspapers days after the incident?

The effects’ studies in advertising are based on the assumption that mass media have significant effects. Although Joseph Klapper (1960) assigned much more modest role to media in causing any planned or unintended effect yet much money and effort is spent on directing the media to achieve such effects.

Vidura reproduces the text of this celebrated editor’s speech at the KC Mammen Mappillai Memorial Lecture on ‘Freedom of the Press in an Age of Violence, which was delivered in New Delhi on November 15, 2007.

Some of the facts are still controversial and tempers are rising along with temperatures and fear. The pendulum of opinions swings from “doesn’t really matter” through “could be” to “millions will die if we don’t starting taking action right now”.

Statistics have it that in 2006-2007 there has been a 55.1 percent growth in enrolments and 95.8 percent growth in commencements of Indian students in Australian universities. However, the total number of Indian migrants (25 percent of the total migrants) for the same period is a little hard to come by.

The flint stone was flung at the judge, but it narrowly missed the target; ject un brickbat a le dit justice que narrowly mist goes the mixed language (quite like our present day newspapers) report of one of the earliest recorded cases of contempt of court. The judge it seems was leaning low and the missile missed the target. The judge remarked to his friends, “You see, now, if I had been an upright judge, I had been slain.”