The Hindu's opinion page is crap !
The Hindu had a major redesign/revamp almost a year back and finally it dawned on me that its Opinion page has become a complete mess. It still has a decent article on an average once every 2 days or so, (like today's one about the Archeological Society of India) but other than that its pretty terrible. I tend to respect their Editorials because of their on-high tone but then recently read a critique of editorials on thehoot.org that made me realize that they were probably not so hot. And sometimes they have these asinine paen editorials to Roger Federer or other sports personalities. Or weighty weigh-ins on the state of the cricket team.
But much worse they have this major syndication thing going with the Guardian of the UK. The syndicated articles might fall into one of these categories:
1.) An article about the US. Mostly I find these run-of-the-mill left wing stuff that doesn't show any insight. Great -- we get to understand America through the standard British left-wing lens.
2.) Some stuff utterly irrelevant to India like obesity epidemic, curbing unsolicited telephone calls, how secure FaceBook is (!!!)
3.) Somewhat more relevant stuff, usually ponderous meditations on terrorism.
The local opinions tend towards being monopolized by a small set of people and generally don't merit being on the edit page. Sometimes the articles are cringeworthy.
However it does compensate by some truly excellent occasional articles. Sainath gets a look-in every now and then, and its always healthy to be reminded that there are still people committing suicide at regular intervals while we grow at 9% (although when he goes off-topic he sucks). There were a couple of great pieces by Krishna Kumar the head of NCERT. I remember 1 or 2 great pieces by Jean Dreze.
Umm... well that's it I guess. Not a very coherent post.
But much worse they have this major syndication thing going with the Guardian of the UK. The syndicated articles might fall into one of these categories:
1.) An article about the US. Mostly I find these run-of-the-mill left wing stuff that doesn't show any insight. Great -- we get to understand America through the standard British left-wing lens.
2.) Some stuff utterly irrelevant to India like obesity epidemic, curbing unsolicited telephone calls, how secure FaceBook is (!!!)
3.) Somewhat more relevant stuff, usually ponderous meditations on terrorism.
The local opinions tend towards being monopolized by a small set of people and generally don't merit being on the edit page. Sometimes the articles are cringeworthy.
However it does compensate by some truly excellent occasional articles. Sainath gets a look-in every now and then, and its always healthy to be reminded that there are still people committing suicide at regular intervals while we grow at 9% (although when he goes off-topic he sucks). There were a couple of great pieces by Krishna Kumar the head of NCERT. I remember 1 or 2 great pieces by Jean Dreze.
Umm... well that's it I guess. Not a very coherent post.
posted by VK at 8:59 AM
5 Comments:
Finally you are coming around to my view - the hindu is the worst english language news paper in this or any other neighboring galaxy.
But whats get me the most is not that they pontificate what England should do regarding their foreign policy regarding Ivory Coast but because they dont take a meaningful stand on the things they can influence.
Arvind
pals,
its good to hear your voice again leps.
those pieces on obesity and the security of facebook are so insulting. cricket and tennis seem more forgivable. as does, somehow, the regular serving of h(b)ollywood sleaze.
if this is the balance the paper strikes (or doesn't) then it is hard to take it seriously. the only saving grace is that these seem to be slips in a cut-and-paste situation.
Also N Ram is probably on the chinese pay roll. I read his article on the dalai lama sometime this month and it was completely and utterly despicable.
Heres from wikipedia link and in the criticism section you can read about their anti tibet bias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_hindu
check this out!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijay_Times
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