A senior official of the country’s most powerful institution recently accepted the called the demands of a disturbingly burgeoning rights’ movement as genuine and said so at a gathering of 25 to 30 top journalists of the city where he was posted.
This took the wind out of the sails of the cheerleaders of the institution, who had been calling said movement as one run by agents of RAW and NDS. Realising this gaffe, the institution’s department of spin personally called not only the aforementioned two dozen journalists but also their respective central newsrooms to “kill the story,” as they say in journalism.
Let that sink in: the decision to kill stories depends on the editor of the paper; here, an outsider was saying this. Second, whenever there is pressure from outside forces, it is usually regarding a story that is an exclusive and would otherwise not have been covered. Here, it was an on-the-record event attended by two dozen of a major city’s top journalists. Akin to, say, the federal government asking the news media not to cover the Faizabad dharna to begin with; a “nothing to see here, folks.”
Third, the instructions were communicated in a forceful “within two minutes,” manner.
None of the papers carried the news item.
The question of whether there is free press in the country is couplicated.