Tamil newspapers are increasingly taking interest in affairs beyond their neighbourhood. Or, may be, it is just another proof that Gujarat elections are all-pervasive.
Tamil newspapers are increasingly taking interest in affairs beyond their neighbourhood. Or, may be, it is just another proof that Gujarat elections are all-pervasive.
Narendra Modi, Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and the election commission were all over the front pages of Tamil papers last week, often pushing the DMK-PMK tussle and curtain-raisers to the DMK youth wing conference on
Saturday to the inside pages.
Dina Thanthi, the second-largest circulated paper carried banner headlines on Gujarat elections for five consecutive days. Dinakaran, the largest circulated paper from the house of Marans, and Dina Mani from the Indian Express (Madurai) group, also gave prominence to stories on EC notice to Modi, and later to Sonia. Sticking to the tradition, none offered political analyses.
Amidst the Gujarat drama, the arrest of two LTTE men in Chennai on December 8 found its way to all the newspapers’ front pages. Dina Malar played up the arrest of nine persons for selling colour televisions the government had distributed to the poor.
Malar devoted more than half of its front page on December 12 for the story, obviously because the paper had exposed the illegal sale the previous day. Not to be carried away by the Modi circus, the paper also focused on a local development - the government ban on sun-control films on car windows.
The paper front-paged the announcement, followed it up with pictures of films being removed from private vehicles and, later, a photograph of a police officer’s car with the dark-tinted windows intact!
Changing along with its new-look English sister The New Indian Express, Dina Mani has started experimenting with contemporary page design. In a major deviation from the traditional vernacular pages full of news stories, Dina Mani carries no more than five stories on its front page, which has ample white space.
Dina Mani, along with Dinakaran, front-paged the fight between PMK leader S Ramadoss and DMK’s Arcot Veerasamy, which has signalled the end of the honeymoon between the two parties.
Dina Thanthi pushed the story to its inside pages, giving the story as much importance as that of K Karunakaran in Kerala returning to the Congress fold.
Dina Mani, the only mainstream Tamil paper to have a regular editorial, came out with a strongly worded piece on the ostentatious arrangements for the DMK youth wing conference in Tirunelveli, which is touted as another step towards MK Stalin’s coronation. Comparing political conferences of the past, the editorial hit out at the lavishness this time.
“The quantity of fabric being used for banners across the state is enough to cloth the semi-naked sleeping on the pavements. The amount of paper used for posters is enough to provide free books to poor school children,” it said.
arunram@dnaindia.net
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