PARMANAND PANDEY NAMED PRABHASH JOSHI AND COULD NOT MUSTER COURAGE TO NAME HIM IN HARD PRINT. PRABHASH JOSHI IS THE ONLY EDITOR WHO USED TO CALL LATE GOENKA–RNG AND SNUBBED HIM MANY TIMES FOR INTERFERING IN EDITORIAL MATTERS-ON RECORD. PANDEY WAS SACKED AND SO WAS I, BY PRABHASH JOSHI BUT THAT DOES NOT MAKE HIM A SYCOPHANT. HE IS ONE OF THE GREATEST EDITOR AROUND.

I WOULD LOVE A CANDID PROFILE OF K VIKRAM RAO BY PARMANAND JI. HOW HE USED TRADE UNION TO MAKE HIS MILLIONS AND A PRINTING PRESS.

My experience is that most of the editors behave like agents, jobbers and pimps for their own proprietors.Their role has been reduced to be the middlemen/women between the power that be and the owners on the one hand, and owners and rest of journalists/ employees on the other hand.

I am yet to see an editor who has taken the side of the employees vis-a-vis proprietors. Strangely, when they are are kicked out they cry hoarse in the name of freedom of speech and expression.

I don’t have any hesitation in telling that most of the editors work for self -aggrandisement. Most of them are unscrupulous and totally bereft of any ideology. You can see for your own that many of them are braggart and shamelessly flaunt their proximity with those who matter.

There is one magazine that has listed sixty great Indians and it has included the late Ram Nath Goenka of the Indian Express. What could be more shocking than this? It is as clear as day light that he was an enemy of the working class. Made money by all fair and foul means, mostly by foul means. He was in the habit of locking horns with those who did not help him in the expansion of his empire. He was using his paper with the help of subservient editors for his own purposes. Any body opposed to it was immediately branded as the adversary of the freedom of press.

I know one editor, who is still alive, whose only qualification was that no body could beat him in sycophancy of Ram Nath Goenka and yet he claims to be a great Gandhian. These are the people who brought disrepute to journalism and they need to be exposed.

There are many editors, whose single point goal is to make money and they are worst than corrupt officers and politicians. That is why, my dear friend, there is no need to shed tears on their exit.

I am of the considered opinion that journalism does not guide the society. It has always played second fiddle to the pioneering forces. Mahatma Gandhi, or for that matter any body, did not become great leader because he was a journalist but he, like others, adopted journalism to propagate his own view points.

Today market forces are playing the lead role and they will inexorably influence the shape and colour of journalism regardless of the fact whether we have the institution of editors or not.

Parmanand Pandey
Secretary General, Indian Federation of Working Journalists

India is not so lucky by that way. We have people who still appear to be slaves.

We need writers/reporters who can give India the right direction. Our leaders are dividing us and I see no one who can get cleanse the system.