Tidbits of the region’s media

If familiarity really does breed fondness, CP is in real danger of falling madly in love with Mahinda Rajapaksa;he seems to keep doing things that cannot be ignored.Though he had to return, jet-black moustache droopy and quivering, from Oxford recently, the lion of Ceylon still roars as loud as ever to protect his kingship against the slightest upstart challenge.With the suffocation of the mainstream media well under way, King Mahinda has turned his eyes to the next enemy: posters.Over the last few months, security forces have arrested about two dozen people,many university students, for pasting and handing out posters touching upon issues such as workers' rights and the privatisation of higher education. One of the offending posters was for a play titled 'An Uncertified Death' and had the line 'Whoever comes to power whenever, uncertified deaths across the country'.All the world may be a stage, but the Lion will have none of it, it seems.

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Almost a month after Open magazine's explosive exposé, the Radia-media battle is far from over. While the first set of tapes implicated known journalists, including Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi, Outlook posted 800 new tapes, sending jitters down the spines of the high and mighty of the Indian media.Right after the first set of tapes was released, the entire big media region in India zipped their lips, with nary a peep even from commentators who are all fire and brimstone every time a government official or a nonmedia person for that matter is implicated even remotely in some vague wrongdoing. Great show of 'solidarity',people! We must stick together, and nothing must come in the way of our revenue, NDTV, meanwhile, had set up a debate (read: desperate face-saving measure) in its studios. To say that Dutt bungled it up big-time would be an understatement. Her protestations about leading Niira Radia on might have been believable, had she not behaved like the goddess of 'political journalism' and shot her mouth off constantly. Sanghvi, on the other hand, has reportedly been demoted, but he claims that the change in position had nothing to do with 'Radiagate'. He is currently regaling readers with inane food-related tweets from exotic locations.