PR discussions: RE: [prpoint] Nira Radia and media manipulation

Dear Friends ,

The more I hear of the tapes I wonder what has Nira Radia done wrong ? (unless there is proof of exchange of money to influence) , it looks like she has done her job fantastically well. How can she be blamed for the failure of the system , the system existed she has just used the system . How many of us truly believe that politicians need a Nira to form government ? and what if she pitched the story line for her clients to the media dont all Pr professionals do that ?as someone has said earlier whether Vir was stringing or singing is not her problem.

And to get to the root why did corporate houses need to lobby in the first place to do business in India ? if you watch the NDTV interview of Deepak Parekh it would be clear that doing business in India is getting difficult (I think it is a must watch interview)

Suddenly it looks like Nira Radia is anti-national and a spy and that is why her phones were tapped for 2 years ! do you need that much time to find out , why was no action taken swiftly , why two years ? So for 2 years anyone who spoke to Nira is now tainted if the name appears in the call ! Finally today even the PM has spoken up you cannot just invade the privacy of individuals and destroy their reputation.

Let us just stop attacking Nira , Nira happened because the sytem let it happen . If at all look at the system , get to the root of the problem and get a solution for that.

Sanjay Mudnaney

To: prpoint@yahoogroups.com
From: naren_vna@yahoo.com
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 23:00:32 -0800
Subject: Re: [prpoint] Nira Radia and media manipulation

Dear Friends

As a PR person, i have the liberty to discuss everything under the Sun with my client. The clients that Nira has are all very sensitive. For them Media stories will be of great help to turn the attention/opinion & Perception of the stakeholder. Nira has gone out of the way to get things done for her clients. Its wrong to blame individuals here. I guess the bigger force, the corporate should be penalized...

Best regards

Narren

From: V Jagannathan <v_jagannathan@yahoo.com>
To: prpoint@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tue, December 14, 2010 11:27:16 AM
Subject: Re: [prpoint] Nira Radia and media manipulation

As far as Nira Radia is concerned she has done her duty beautifully. As a PR person, lobbyist it seems she has delivered what is expected out of her - going by the corporates and the lobby bodies like CII as her clients.

If others fell for her or fell in her line then it is a matter of concern.

--- On Tue, 12/14/10, navendu mahodaya <navendumahodaya@yahoo.co.in> wrote:

From: navendu mahodaya <navendumahodaya@yahoo.co.in>
Subject: Re: [prpoint] Nira Radia and media manipulation
To: prpoint@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tuesday, December 14, 2010, 10:51 AM

The revelations made by these articles are revealing more about the state-of-the-art of PR..

The purely private conversations that Vinod Mehta is referring to may reveal secrets like "How to acquire a PR Account?" And if so, his caution in not publishing those is understandably justified.

It is difficult to confirm if Vir Sanghvi is 'stringing along' or 'singing along'!

These revelations are also very educative. They clearly establish the 'new age PR deliverables' and to that extent are enriching the practitioners of the trade.

Why get troubled by a certain oligarchs taking over certain resources? Isn't every one in the game with similar intentions?

So the noise is all about 'being holier than thou!'

Or what else? Please comment!

--- On Mon, 13/12/10, Prime Point Srinivasan <prpoint@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Prime Point Srinivasan <prpoint@gmail.com>
Subject: [prpoint] Nira Radia and media manipulation
To: "Prpoint Group" <prpoint@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Monday, 13 December, 2010, 6:15 PM

Hi all

Today's (13 dec 2010) The Hindu has carried an excellent article on the nexus between Nira Radia and media. Please read this.

Sriniasan

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article948425.ece

In Radia tapes, an alarming picture of media manipulation

PRISCILLA JEBARAJ

They show strategy of planting, killing stories, and blacklisting agency

The contents of a fresh set of leaked phone conversations involving Niira Radia and her associates paint an alarming picture of the extent to which the influential lobbyist — whose clients include Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata — sought to influence, use, manipulate and even browbeat the media in pursuit of her corporate agendas. Apart from highlighting the use of journalists to plant stories and columns or as intermediaries with politicians, the latest tapes released by the news magazine, Outlook, suggest more strong-arm lobbying techniques were also used or considered, including the possibility of blacklisting the national news agency, PTI.

Outlook, which had earlier published 140 conversations originally intercepted by the Income Tax department as part of its ongoing surveillance of Ms. Radia, now says it has 800 more conversations in its possession. Nineteen of those audio tapes, with partial summaries, were published on its website by Sunday evening. Editor Vinod Mehta said that all the tapes were being vetted, and eventually would be put in the public domain, except for those which were purely private conversations.

In one tape, HT Media advisor Vir Sanghvi has a follow-up conversation with Ms. Radia regarding his June 21, 2009 column in the Hindustan Times on the tussle between the Ambani brothers over gas pricing, framed as an article about oligarchs taking over natural resources.

"Wrote it… I've dressed it up as a piece about how the public will not stand for resources being cornered, how we're creating a new list of oligarchs," Mr. Sanghvi tells Ms. Radia. "Very nice, lovely, thank you, Vir," she says, while he adds: "It's dressed up as a plea to Manmohan Singh, so it won't look like an inter-Ambani battle except to people in the know."

Confronted with this tape, Mr. Sanghvi still insists he was just stringing her along, "sweet-talking" a news source. In an interview to TheHindu, he claims the final published column included elements that Ms. Radia was unhappy about, proof that he was not exclusively pandering to her agenda.

While this particular column seemed to have elements taken word-for-word from a previous conversation with Ms. Radia, the lobbyist's efforts to ensure the publication of favourable articles took various other forms.

In other tapes, she is heard instructing an IAS officer to do an interview with a journalist for a story critical of Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel, and telling a subordinate to compile questions for Mr. Sanghvi's interviews with Mr. Mukesh Ambani or Mr. Tata, both of whom are represented by Ms. Radia.

In another conversation, she seems to be directing the entire restructuring of the channel News X, which raises questions about her editorial influence there as well.

She does not hesitate to take negative action either, the most striking example of which is the discussion of a communication plan for the Reliance Industries group, which includes a proposal to "blacklist" news agency PTI, possibly in cooperation with the Tata group.

Ms. Radia's conversations include an attempt to manipulate the media and the police into providing bad publicity for rival Anil Ambani's Reliance Communications in Jammu. She also discusses "incorrect edits" and "a serious problem with [ET's] desk in Delhi", and gloats about shifting a Noel Tata interview from a resistant Businessworld to a seemingly more cooperative Business Today magazine. However, the final laugh seemed to be on her in that particular case, with Business Today's former editor, Rohit Saran, pointing out that he went ahead with his own editorial agenda in the final published version of the interview, much to Ms. Radia's chagrin.