Just when you thought that the appeal of the scoop was thinning out for its banal regularity, the old hand at front page scoops, The Indian Express (IE) gave it a lease (rather ‘siege’) of life with a front page shocker. The Indian Express (April 4, 2012) had a stand-alone front page flyer claiming that “two key Army units moved towards Delhi without notifying Govt”, and the critics of this supposedly ‘investigative’ piece of journalism had a mouthful of venom to spew. And spew they did. Dilettantism  is the word that comes to your mind when you look at the tenuous line of veracity on which the scoop hangs and the frenzy with which critics have jumped the gun to trash the report. The fault lines of the report might be seen in overlooking the vital civil servant link in the military- political leadership continuum of the reported ‘face off’. Critics would help themselves though by remembering that it took almost six months for Washington Post’s story on Watergate to be taken seriously by other sections of the American press. Is there any reason to give up that basic tenet of inquiry – to doubt everything? Time to follow the ‘be sceptical, stupid’ line.

Two leading dailies had other plans for making front page statements on the same day (April 4, 2012). Why bother about the military-civilian face off when there is always the lucrative trade-off? You had The Times of India and The Hindustan Times trading their mastheads for larger-than-news IPL multi-starrer ads. Restoring some routine sanity to the front page vagaries of the day, The Hindu reported ‘Bounty on Lashkar chief draws Indian praise’ with a rider ‘Experts warn that the US reward is unlikely to jolt Pakistan into action’. On the emerging contours in Indo-Pak relations and possibilities of the Pak President’s visit, the paper comments in its editorial: “For New Delhi, wisdom lies in not allowing national exultation over the American bounty to colour its expectations of this private – but significant – presidential visit. Hafiz Saeed is as much an enemy of India as he is of democracy in Pakistan and there is little point in reminding Mr. Zardari of his powerlessness in the face of the Lashkar chief’s uniformed patrons. Despite the evident tension which exists between the civilian, judicial and military elements that make up the Pakistani state, there is no denying the new ease in relations with India.” The unfolding of a bureaucrat-builder-politician nexus in the Adarsh scam, compensation for counter-insurgency victims in Punjab and top Myanmar officials hailing the poll results are the other major stories that found a place on its page for the day.

A significant aspect of coverage of Myanmar polls in major dailies was its mysterious appearance on front page from nowhere. The smiling Aung San Suu Kyi was not heralded on the front page with build-up stories on the polls in the days leading to the polls. One fine morning, the papers reminded us that Myanmar existed on the globe and it had its electoral tryst with democracy under a military junta. But on the edit pages, the polls found its due place in editorial discourse, with The Hindustan Times summing it up cogently: “With SuuKyi’s win and a reformist general, democracy is now a possibility in Myanmar” (April 3, 2012).

If you stayed on the edit and op-ed pages, you couldn’t miss Ramachandra Guha’s historically insightful plea for the favourable review of visa extension for historian Peter Heehs(Hindustan Times, April 3, 2012). Guha has traced the strands of the contribution made by foreign scholars in intellectual evolution of contemporary India. The Congress was the key focus on Wednesday for lead articles on the edit pages of The Indian Express and The Hindu. The eminent public intellectual, Pratap Bhanu Mehta incisively dissected the ‘culture of political liability’ plaguing the Grand Old Party (‘Letter to Sonia’, The Indian Express, April 4, 2012), while political commentator Harish Khare offered his prescriptions for the dysfunctional party (‘Time for House-cleaning in the Congress’, The Hindu, April 4, 2012).

Obituary writing is an underrated genre in journalistic writing but we’ve all heard of people who have a rather morbid penchant for rushing to the obituary pages of The Economist, Time and of course The New York Times. We had two remarkable obituaries of an outstanding individual. The tributes by Harsh Mander (The Hindu, April2, 2012) and Y.K. Alagh (The Indian Express, April 4, 2012) to legendary civil servant P S Appuwere worth saving for posterity. One of the rare paper clipping instances this week.