Roadies sex clip: The argument continues
MTV VJ: I'm appalled at Tamanna storyu00a0
Nikhil Chinnappa
MTV VJ
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Chinnappa says girl in the story Is that you, Tamanna? is not a Roadie
MiD DAY's front page on June 22 Is that you, Tamanna?u00a0 clearly suggests that the girl in the video is Tamanna (who I have never met and do not know, aside from the endless hours of footage I and the rest of the country have seen of her and the rest of the contestants on the show Roadies).
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After taking the trouble to check the authenticity of your paper's claim, I felt compelled to send you my thoughts on the same I was shocked to see that MiD DAY would sink to such shoddy tabloidism to sell it's paper.u00a0
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1.The girl in the video bears no resemblance to Tamanna.
2. The pendant in the video is obviously not the same, as the one worn by Tamanna on the MTV show Roadies. One is an Om sign and one is a crucifix.
I am appalled that a paper that I enjoy reading and look up to for it's journalistic values, would not even bother to check the authenticity of the speculative claim it has made on its front page.
The kind of damage MiD DAY has done to an innocent girl's reputation and the pain it must have caused her family and friends is unimaginable.
I do hope that MiD DAY will be able to make amends just as loudly and boldly as the brazen claim it has made on its front page yesterday.
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Here's meat for moral eagles
MiD DAY Editor
Abhijit Majumder
From morning, our website, https://www.mid-day.com/, was turgid with mail and clicks. Veejay Nikhil Chinnappa expressed his disgust. In all my years with newspapers, I can't remember important people writing in to express anguish about farmers' suicides, urban malnutrition or chronic power cuts.
So what? Sex is that sort of a thing.
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Otherwise perfectly busy people find time to read in detail, rage, rant, write long posts, press the submit button, and respond all over again to the responses to their messages.
It was the same the last time MiD DAY broke the Noida sex clip scandal. For the next 48 hours or so, Google got the maximum number of India searches on the subject. MiD DAY, meanwhile, broke a few other stories in the last few months. How, for instance, the Mumbai police had faulty bulletproof vests on 26/11, how Pakistan had about 1,600 of our fishing boats that they use for spying, how small investors were being cheated by big financial bullies, how our industrialists were getting Rs 350 crore-apiece private jets delivered during slowdown, how Tipu Sultan's last war dress was found in a nondescript godown near Mysore, how the CBI went slow on Nandigram after the West Bengal police promised to slow down probe into the death of a Nithari witness, how the then-CBI chief allegedly tried to botch up evidence in the murder. The last two are now part of the Nithari case files at the Supreme Court.
Sex and sex tapes are a very prominent part of our popular culture, and we will continue to report about them. Slander was never our intention, and nowhere have we said in our reports that it was Tamanna in the sex tape.
Out of 100 of our front-page lead stories, I guess five would be on sex or a sex scandal. The vast majority of stories are made up of less exciting stuff. A day before the sex tape report, we broke the story of how India's youngest ever accused a two-month-old arrested and released for dowry harassment is a particularly baroque piece of legal farce.
None of these stories prompted celebs and moral eagles to swoop down. Where's the meat, obviously? And where's the mileage?
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Ethics and MTV
Daipayan Halder
Delhi City Editor
This is getting interesting. MiD DAY has not only managed to shock the serious and the sanctimonious. It has made MTV VJ Nikhil Chinappa break into cold sweat and blog on ethics in journalism (sic). All this because we reported that a sex clip featuring a girl with a striking resemblance to Tamanna from the reality show MTV Roadies is in circulation.
Chinappa has been posting his opinions on the MiD DAY site since then. Which is not a bad thing, just that the motor-mouth veejay would be better off talking music than trashing tabloids. Those of you following Roadies and Splitsvilla on MTV would know that anything goes in the name of reality TV.
I remember one episode where an interviewee broke down after he was told that his girlfriend is a s**t. He was rejected for being faint-hearted. In yet another episode a girl got selected after mouthing the choicest abuses.
Some criteria that!
u00a0am no fan of Sushma Swaraj who had clamped down on FTV and other channels for showing adult content as I&B minister. But promoting promiscuous behaviour and making fun of women with small breasts on national television is the other extreme. All for a game of love.u00a0
After the Tamanna sex tape story, more clips featuring Roadies and Splitsvilla contestants or their look-alikes are being forwarded to us from various sources. As one Splitsvilla contestant confessed, "The show never quite ends. When they almost show you taking a leak on live TV, how difficult is it to do a sex tape." Something for the makers of Roadies to munch on. Till then Chinappa can brush up on his writing skills.
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