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Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Shivam Vij and Journalistic Ethics

I am a blogger. I am not a journalist. I write opinions. Even rants. But I don't write anything which is factually incorrect. Even the most opinionated and politically incorrect bloggers, like Nilu, do not go as far as to concoct facts.

So I was surprised when I read this article in Himal Mag about Indian bloggers and MSM by Shivam Vij. About the IIPM issue, he writes -

In the brouhaha that followed, the management institute even managed to pressure the employer of one of the bloggers into sacking him.


As I had written on my blog in 2005, I was not sacked. I resigned for reasons that I explained. Several bloggers also noted in their posts that I resigned. Heck, even Shivam himself wrote that I had resigned.

Coming from a run-of-the-mill journalist, this could have been dismissed as "bad homework". But I was surprised to see that in an article by Shivam, who had been actively involved in the discussions on this. I thought that maybe someone on Himal's editorial team was chopping and changing his article and made this change in an attempt to paraphrase what happened. But the same line also appears on Kafila, a group blog to which Shivam contributes.

That line is factually incorrect, and considering that Shivam KNOWS that I resigned and was not sacked, I wonder why it was written.

I have written to Himal Mag requesting that they correct the line, and have also mailed Shivam to make the change on Kafila.

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