I Have Looked Into The Eyes Of The Rubes And They Are...

...Us.

When the real Bollywood Oscars told her to take a hike after she told them she wanted to move the date up to hit the pre-election market Christy Clark went shopping.

And the Times of India bought her ad.

Which she paid for with our money.

How do we know this?

Well, last fall Ken Aueletta, writing in the New Yorker, explained how the Times of India does its thing.

Here is his lede:

ANNALS OF COMMUNICATIONS about Samir and Vineet Jain, the two brothers who run the Times of India, which has the largest circulation of any English-language newspaper in the world. While profits have been declining at newspapers in the West, India is one of the few places on earth where newspapers still thrive; in fact, circulation and advertising are rising. In part, this is because many Indian newspapers, following an approach pioneered by the Jain brothers, have been dismantling the wall between the newsroom and the sales department. At the Times of India, for example, celebrities and advertisers pay the paper to have its reporters write advertorials about their brands in its supplementary sections; the newspaper enters into private-treaty agreements with some advertisers, accepting equity in the advertisers’ firms as partial payment...


Now.

For the story of how the entire province's citizenry has been played for saps by everyone involved, particularly given how little the Bollywood Awards had to do with selling British Columbia to South Asia, head on over to Ian Reid's place.

Here's a chunk of Ian's latest:

...Times of India subsidiary MediaNet was set up to market celebrities and the film industry. Celebrities, their agents and producers pay MediaNet to develop and publish stories about them.

TOIFA is an extension of this strategy. The market, contrary to the Sun story, is not the 1.3 billion Indian nationals as the Sun’s reporter appears to suggest. The Times of India – as an English language paper – is only India’s 13th largest paper. It’s TV arm is also a comparatively small player.

What the Times of India Film Awards are is a new, untested attempt by the Times of India to make more money generating stories that serve the advertisers’ needs. In this case the advertiser is Christy Clark and her needs are political.

If our government were interested in reaching the huge Indian film industry it would have done what Ontario did and gone with the Awards show with the proven ability to reach that market...


Go read it Ian's entire post so that you can see how he also gets to the heart of the matter regarding a Bollywood advertorial disguised as a news piece that recently appeared in a local print organ.


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