Why do I feel the TN media is controlled and silenced by the ruling DMK govt?
Let me give you an example. In Oct ’22, when I was analyzing/reporting the Coimbatore car blast, I found that the 5 initially arrested had links to the ’98 Coimbatore blasts accused.
I immediately confirmed this with the TN police sources and then was baffled that it was not reported by any of the Tamilnadu media channels. This is when I started speaking with senior journalists and friends in the TN media circles which included senior journos and even Editors of news channels. That’s when I realized that the mere reporting of the Coimbatore blast as a terror incident resulted in heavy pressure from state government agencies and there were requests to tone down the reporting.
(Remember for many days the government was referring to it as a car cylinder explosion)
On further confirming the identities of the accused, I directly spoke to Rahul Kanwal at 11 pm IST (owing to the seriousness of the news break) and then sat through the entire night and published this story at 01:42 am IST to ensure the truth was out.
It was the first-ever report to link the 2 incidents. Many TN-based channels and media houses (including those I spoke to) picked up this story once they knew a national channel had reported this news. Now they could safely report the same and some of them personally thanked me.
This is why it’s not surprising that TN media hardly reports anything on the Narco-terrorism allegations against members of the ruling party! While some are purely happy to be pliant journalists, many righteous journalists in Tamilnadu don’t have the freedom to report the truth!
This is how Press Freedom works in Tamil Nadu.
(This article has been compiled from the tweet thread posted by @saikirankannan on March 07, 2024, with minor edits to improve readability and conform to HinduPost style guide)
