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MTV VJ: I'm appalled at Tamanna story |
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By: MiDDAY |
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Date:
2009-06-23 |
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Place: Delhi |
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Nikhil 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? 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).
 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.
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.
Here's meat for moral eagles
SEX brings us alive. Nothing, absolutely nothing else, would have made hundreds of people pour their anger, hate, moral outrage, disgust, applause and even pure thrill than the news of what is being circulated in the shadows of Fort or Palika Bazaar or the alleyways of the Internet as the sex tape of a girl resembling popular MTV Roadies contestant Tamanna.
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MiD DAY' executive editor Abhijit Majumder responds to the MTV VJ | From morning, our website, http://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.
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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