“Consider this. N Murali, the managing director of The Hindu, in a widely circulated letter recently, after a 40-year-long career in the Chennai-based, family-owned newspaper goes on to allege that its editorial section was run like a ‘banana republic’.
“It is indeed unfortunate that editorial primacy has been sacrificed at the altar of excessive commercialism and vested interests to pander to the wishes of some of the directors who have a crass disregard of the values The Hindu has always stood for,” he adds.
Pointing to the blatant pro-CPI-M and pro-Chinese tilt in coverage, Murali puts the matter in proper perspective when he concludes, “When the media is used as a means to achieve private ends it undoubtedly becomes a calamity.”
Remember The Hindu is no ordinary newspaper — it is held in high esteem by Chennai’s intellectual class. That allows someone to fashion the thinking of Chennai’s vocal class by influencing editorials and writing columns in The Hindu.”
Comment:
Wondering what those pro-China, pro-Communist Party (Marxist), and commercial interests in Chennai could be? I’ll take a guess.
When I was interviewed by the Hindu in 2007 following the publication of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets,” I ended the interview with an endorsement of Ron Paul. I also said Naomi Klein’s book “Shock Doctrine” which came out at the same time, falsely blamed the excesses of neo-liberalism on the free-markets, where the proper term was state (managed)capitalism. I also pointed out that it was not Milton Friedman, but Jeffrey Sachs, who introduced “shock therapy” into the Soviet Union, and it was the Federal Reserve chairman Greenspan, as well as Robert Rubin and Goldman Sachs, Democrats both, who had the most hand in turning the markets into a casino in the late 1990s. As I’ve mentioned on this blog, certain sections of this interview were cut out. I wasn’t sure at the time, but this quote from Murali clarifies things.
Goldman Sachs is a big player in Chennai real estate, along with many other multinationals. Goldman Sachs is left of center, a big funder of Democrats, and a major stake-holder in the Chinese market, heavily driven by the state. Chinese bankers have even trained at Goldman-run institutions in New York.