We can’t or do not want to answer your question, so we will question your motives, instead.”
In the past five days, two companies decided to adopt the approach while dealing with Mint.
The first instance involved MCX-SX, which has been embroiled in a legal battle with stock market regulator Sebi, and believes that Mint’s coverage of the dispute is not sympathetic to its interests. Earlier this week, when one of Mint’s reporters found out that the exchange could also possibly be in violation of a Sebi norm on the quantum of the stake in the exchange that can be held by entities that trade on it (an entirely different issue from the one on which Sebi and the exchange have gone to court), and asked for an explanation, here is the response he received from Setu Shah, senior vice-president, communications, MCX-SX:
Jayachandran/Mint
“We have observed in the past and officially complained to the highest authorities in Mint,
including the editor and the Mint
ethics committee, about stories pursued by your newspaper on issues that are being heard in the court of law, with the ulterior motive to drive our competitor’s agenda or cause us harm by trying to opine on the judicial process. Unfortunately our complaints have gone unheard and we have never got a written reply or were even granted a meeting with the editor or the ethics committee on these serious issues we raised. It has now become a pattern with Mint
that to pursue stories that are sensitive to MCX-SX or are on matters that are sub-judice. In recent instance even after our detailed official replies to your questions (to) us or to our promoting companies, either you have not taken the complete reply or have scrapped the story altogether since our replies may have derailed your hidden agenda. As for your current questions on our shareholding, we would like to reiterate that these matters are sub-judice and may lead to opining on the legal process. Hence we will not like to comment as your queries are advocating points that are to be decided in the court of law.” We carried the story, the quote, and a response from me saying: MCX has never complained to the ethics committee of Mint.Its executives, in meetings with me, have conveyed their displeasure with Mint’s stories (belying the spokesperson’s claims about letters being written and meetings not being granted), but these have had more to do with allegations about the stories being motivated rather than factual inaccuracies.
The day after we carried the MCX-SX story, we came under fire from another company that has been embroiled in a legal battle with Sebi (the case is now before the Supreme Court) and has also filed a defamation case in Patna against me and some of Mint’s reporters over our coverage of the dispute.
At a press conference in Mumbai to announce a joint venture between Sahara Prime City and Turner Construction, when Mint’s Harini Subramani asked Nicholas E. Billotti, president and chief executive of Turner, on the potential impact of the court’s judgement (when it comes), Subrata Roy, chairman of the Sahara group, intervened aggressively: “Is it the objective of yours to just confuse and create unnecessary talks. He (Billotti) is a foreign person, he has nothing to do with the regulator here. You are just deviating the thing. It is a different constituency, different company and a different matter.”
He went on to say: “I also understand what she is doing. She is from Mint I am sure. She has been writing against us 10 times, I know it. She writes nonsense. We have put a case. She is fighting a legal battle with us.”
Roy later apologized, saying he should not have reacted in the manner that he had: “I lost my cool.” (He also got something else wrong. Harini Subramani wasn’t the Mint reporter who covered the Sahara-Sebi spat.)
The common thread to both Roy and Shah’s comments is the attribution of a motive to Mint, when, clearly, none exists. All news stories in Mint and Livemint report and inform. Our online and print opinion sections seek to set the agenda using logical arguments and would probably fall under any court’s definition of “fair comment”. Mint’s editors and writers do not spend their time plotting the downfall of companies. Attempts to see media conspiracies where, indeed, none exist only serve the purpose of elevating business-as-usual coverage—and, to my mind, everything is routine—to a crusade.
And crusades do a disservice to the subject, writer and newspaper, and to journalism itself. Neither Mint, nor I have time for crusades. I’d rather worry about where to hang that great photograph of the white-rumped shama (Copsychus malabaricus) I took and have had framed for my room in the office in a sort of “See, it’s easy” message to Mint’s photographers.
Write to sukumar.r@livemint.com
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