The two golden words on TV

“Fucking shit” – those two golden words were uttered live on a US TV channel the other day. On April 22, 2013, American journalist A J Clemente began his career as a TV anchor uttering those two words not realising that he was live on air. American TV station KYFR fired Clemente for uttering the unutterable. The poor guy didn’t realise he was on air and even drew sympathy from David Letterman on his show. But imagine if Clemente had made a sober, unremarkable TV debut? Now everyone in the world knows him. Fame is made in an instant. Perhaps means don’t matter?

AIR’s sexually harassed RJs

Ooh, aah, ouch. These are queasy times at All-India Radio. On April 17, 2013, two male radio jockeys with AIR in Delhi got the sack for sexually harassing their female counterparts, while another male employee was suspended for similar behaviour. Even the head of the Delhi centre was slapped with a show-cause notice. The grievances against the men had been rising over time. More than 25 female employees protested last month about receiving sexually-coloured comments, advances coupled with a lack of proper work allocation and no raise in pay. Their work or voices may not have been aired, but a clutch of AIR’s personnel have shown their fate is not up in the air.

Radical Times

Chidanand Rajghatta, foreign editor and US correspondent for The Times of India in Washington DC, is a thorough and usually unbiased reporter. Unlike most journalists who are often experts of their beats and a little ignorant about the rest, Rajghatta has covered cricket World Cups and Viswanathan Anand’s rise in the chess circuit, before moving to report upon events like 9/11. Over the weekend, he tripped up.

Covering the Boston marathon bombings an unlikely sentence entered his reporting. “Although Muslim, the family appear not to have shown any radical tendencies.” We know that fundamentalism isn’t confined to Muslims. But have you seen any article saying “Although Hindu/Christian/Buddhist/Zionist, the family appear not to have shown any radical tendencies”?

[Following the publishing of this article, we received an email from Chidanand Rajghatta which said:
“You got me. That was DREADFUL. It should have read….

‘Although RELIGIOUS, the family does not appear to have shown any radical tendencies.’

Deadline riding and expecting the Desk to catch it are poor excuses. I’ll take the rap. Mea culpa.”

We have to say in today’s times where egos are bigger than accomplishments, it’s a welcome change to see experienced scribes have the humility to admit mistakes.]

Going incognito

BBC journalists posed as LSE researchers and went to Pyongyang. The people who are most upset though, are academics. They are those who feel that the methodology of a study is as important to the work as the end product. In that sense, journalists can be rogues who will do whatever they can to get their stories. Commenting on which, Delhi University sociologist Nandini Sundar wrote on the increasing trend of ends taking over means in journalism. When scribes pose as researchers, they eat into the turf of academics and smudge their street cred, she writes. As an example, Sundar wrote that reporters at Tehelka in 2007 who interviewed ASM Meena have posed as researchers in investigating about the post-Godhra carnage. Ironically, as the article appeared, so did Tehelka’s latest issue with a cover story on the Tamils of Sri Lanka. A story which was written while the reporter travelled through Sri Lanka disguised as “a tourist”. We’re waiting for the tourism industry to be up in arms next.

Hacking into a newswire’s handle

On April 23, 2013, hackers compromised the Associated Press’ Twitter handle. The tweet said there had been two explosions at the White House and Barack Obama was injured. Later, the AP confirmed that its Twitter account had been suspended following the unauthorised use of its account and said it was fixing the problem. The false tweet briefly sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average sharply lower. Did you think that social media was harmless?