ABSTRACT
When we launched Tehelka in 2000 we made some immodest claims. We said we wanted to rediscover the distinction between journalism, public relations, and entertainment-a distinction that had been blurred in the 1990s by a combination of satellite television, colour pages in the newspapers, and the fi rst giddiness of liberal consumerism. And also by the co-options of politics and business; by the end of the 90s every senior journalist, every publication, could be identifi ed with a political party or a business house. We said we too loved trivia, we too had friends among politicians and businessmen, but we believed that the core of journalism was a very serious one. It was built on the bedrock of uncomfortable questions, not comfortable alignments, nor pretty sentences or pretty pictures (Tejpal 2003: 125, emphasis added).
