Vinod Mehta is India’s Last Great Editor.
As puppy publishers, egged on by tobacco peddlers, softdrinks salesmen, and milkpowder accountants with calculators, strip Indian journalism of its relevance and conscience with a vengeance, the editor-in-chief of Outlook holds a mirror to what could have been.
And as puppet editors sway with the wind and sidle up to the powers-that-be for Rajya Sabha seats, ambassadorships, advisory posts, and the other loaves of office that politicians dangle before salivating journalists, Mehta’s fierce independence is an object lesson of what should be.
Former editor of the men’s magazine Debonair; founder-editor of India’s original weekly newspaper, The Sunday Observer; and editor of The Independent and The Pioneer dailies, Mehta is a master brewer who, over 30 years, has perfected the art of making the important interesting, and shown that good journalism needn’t be bad business.
Alive and articulate, quirky and contrarian, and never boring, Mehta can also write. In this 12-minute churumuri video, the 63-year-old editor talks on the critical reading journalists and journalism students should do; and on how they should approach the craft of writing.
Cross-posted on sans serif
Is there a transcript of this interview ?The audio on my laptop is not helping me..
By the way, i think Vinod Mehta is one od the greatest editors that i have known or seen not sure if he is the ‘last’ great editor
and his dogs name is editor :)
I wish KP could explain why Vinod Mehta is India’s LAST great editor. I agree that is a great editor, but to call him the last one is taking journalistic cynicism to the extremes. It is too early to write the epitaph to Indian journalism.
commendable job churumuri. vinod mehta is truly a very great man.
transcript..if available…???
His “Delhi Diary” rocks –– simple and effective. I would rate him one among the Top 5 we have now. More than Mehta, I must congratulate the Rahejas for being professional in their business and non-interference in editorial activity. Managements are getting very greedy these days, selling their souls, hearts…and what not.
Grrrrrrrrr!
Vinod Mehta’s anguished piece in last week’s Outlook on why Rahul Gandhi is a failure and how the Congress could and should make him more relevant is also one of the great lessons in butt kissing journalism that all students of that craft should read. At the least it will help them get a few crumbs thrown their way by The Party.
If Vinod Mehta is objective, then I am Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physical trainer.
G3S. At least he has the guts to write where he stands in his own name, unlike you and yours truly. But how are you so sure that the unctuous reference to Mehta’s “fierce independence” is to his political leanings (which it may not) and not to his personal inclination (which it may well be)?
Being independent and being objective are two very different things, my friend, but if the “fierce independence” is a reference to his integrity and incorruptibility, that’s something only those who have seen him upclose can attest to. I have not; I hope you have. Good luck.
Aatmasakshi, all points well taken.
However, for a newsmagazine that has pretenses to objectivity, an independent but not objective editor doesn’t really help with said pretense. Newsweek recently got a new editor who is an avowed Christian and since his taking over, there has been a big spurt in sympathetic coverage to the Christian right in the US. He might be “independent” but it does nothing for objectivity. To say that those are not related is a bit of a stretch.
The original post might well claim not to comment on Vinod Mehta’s objectivity. But terms like “independence” (which can easily seem like a proxy to “objective”) seem to be reserved for some and not others. Let me ask you, would you (or anyone else who thinks Vinod Mehta is independent) call the Organiser or the Pioneer as “independent” newspapers? I think many media-liberals would rather have a Brahmin as President.
Having said that, he is a great read.
G3S: Where precisely has Outlook magazine claimed it has “pretenses” (sic) to objectivity? And what is so great about objectivity that it should be followed tooth and nail? Was it Freud who said that the point of view that you should not hold a point of view is itself a point of view?
Objectivity, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder, especially in a politically and communally surcharged country like India. What is objective to you may not be objective to me, and what is objective to both of us may not be objective to anybody else.
Outlook magazine’s strength has been that it is less dogmatic, and more vibrant than the other kids on the block. One week it exposes cricketers, some weeks later it puts them on the cover. One week, it salutes Kerala, some weeks later it mourns its passing. One week it hails Rahul Gandhi, some weeks later it is willing to go in for course correction.
That attitude of treating events and issues as they develop is far more healthy than straitjacketing people/issues. It is certainly better than claiming that our view is the only view and you better agree or else. And that may be a direct result of Vinod Mehta’s “fierce independence”.
If there is one stand that Outlook has consistently taken, it is against the “killer-instinct” of the BJP/VHP/Bajrang Dal in Gujarat, etc. Either you could argue that is a liberal bias at work, or you could say it is a humanist at work. I will go by the latter although all these labels of media-liberals, pseudo-secular, etc, are too easy categorisations to paint people in a corner and stifle further debate.
What India needs is debate, and debate is what Vinod Mehta—like him or lump him—provides with his provocative stand on issues. You can’t say that of virtually most editors.
Aatmasakshi,
The fact that Outlook exposes and dismisses stories from “non-objective” sources as just that tells me it has pretenses to objectivity. The instances are too many to list here, but when MM Joshi was swinging his hatchet on history text books, Outlook sustained a campaign on how history was no longer going to be objective, and how horrible it is that there will be a right wing slant. If Outlook thinks it is good for history textbooks to be objective, it surely thinks it is good for itself to be objective too? If it doesn’t, does it have any locus standi on objectivity?
And as for providing debates, I could turn around your own question – what is so great about debates anyway? What do they do? When was the last time a debate shaped policy or public opinion in our country? What seems to work for us is sloganeering and stirring passions.
And if it is provocative stands you want, I am sure you will get a lot more of those from Tarun Vijay or Chandan Mitra.
Vinod Mehta is a good editor. I enjoy reading him as much as I enjoy reading Shekhar Gupta or MJ Akbar. He is great for having made that jump from Debonair to news magazines – as they say, who would have thunk? But I don’t think he is great for any of the reasons stated in the original post.
SoulTruth
With Jihadi Journos (JJs) like you, India doesn’t need enemies! At his best Vinod Mehta is a shallow clown writing puerile pieces on things he doesn’t fully understand. His Delhi Diary and other diaries are dreary. He is a stirrer of things–I grant you that.
somebody tape the zoom on KP’s camera.
nice topic & otherwise nice vid. what i wonder is how is it that KP could keep quite for 11 whole minutes without probing.
‘cmon AS… The peddling of RG before & after the UP elections destroys any claims of independence on O/L.
what about the hatchet job on military & psus by O/L? wither accountability?
I completely agree that he he is the Last Great Editor in India. The only problem, even his ardent foot soldiers have is he thinks paying journalists more would mean less money for him to buy Editor his favourite Rajinder da Dhaba chicken tikka flavoured pack of Pedigree.
Vinod Mehta apologised to Hindu Groups in UK [in writing] after he was threatened to be be sued for unverified and abusive comments in BBC against Kanchi Acharya– BBC also has to apologise– He settled the issue by paying an unspecified amount –may be financed by the builders who paid his bypass surgery bills–
Unfortunately when others interview hinm they do not ask these inconvenient questions-That is called the brotherhood!!
He is a snake oil salesman whose courage is seen only by supine Indian readers. As long as the legal process for defamation is weak in India the likes of Vinod Metha and N Ram’swill flourish as great and objective journalists–
Objective journalism in India –my left toe!!
Vinod Mehta did a fabulous job as Debonair editor and he should have graduated to editing ‘Playboy’.VM would have made a better editor than HH.
Many thanks for this
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KP is paying tributes to his one time editor….LOL
Vinod Mehta and the last remaining great editors…..ROTFL