For the past several weeks questions like which newspaper group has sold itself to commercial interests more obviously and emphatically have become redundant. All of them are the same.

Journalism seems to have boiled down to who paid for which lie or who paid for which promotion.

If two papers fight about something as trivial as Diana Hayden’s relationship with her ailing father while the other maintains a stoic silence, in another instance we are educated about Karunanidhi’s family tree and who is watering which plant in incestuous detail while two papers exist as if the state of Tamil Nadu got washed away in the Tsunami during the age of the Dinosaurs.

But the wholesale manner in which all three newspapers seem to have sold themselves to the Aliens Group indicate that the media today is in Alien hands. The sanctity of the front page is a distant memory. Even today when front pages should have been dedicated to celebrating the World Cup victory our enthusiasm is dampened by the obvious ploys of a really desperate real estate player who thinks advertising with such impact and such consistency will be seen as a measure of success rather than a pathetic attempt at bravado from a company that’s surely going downhill.

But that’s their problem. They are welcome to project whatever they want and God Bless their endeavours. But the newspapers have something called responsibility to their readers which they seem to have forgotten.

They owe it to the readers to be genuine mirrors of society, social change and issues that are current. Not merely commercial propositions.

One of the elements of pride and joy of say the 1983 World Cup is the picture of Kapil Dev holding up the Cup on the front page. It’s a pity that today’s generation will be denied even this simple pleasure inspite of the fact that the World Cup is coming home.