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As 'The Telegraph' Completes 40 Years, A Look At Its Rise And Fall
One of the front pages of 'The Telegraph'
As The Telegraph completes 40 years today (7 July), there's little to celebrate; the newspaper has become a pale shadow of its former self.
The start: Published under a young and bold editor, Mobasher Jawed (MJ) Akbar, the newspaper hit the stands in Calcutta.
It was well-produced with an appealing and uncluttered layout, and covered a wide range of topics and issues.
MJ steered The Telegraph ably in its formative years and gave the paper a distinctive identity as an incisive, fearless, stylish, and wholesome newspaper produced with an elan that was missing in the industry in India at the time.
The newspaper’s coverage of the arts, heritage, literature, and sciences was noteworthy.
The paper's tilt: The Telegraph was distinctively pro-Congress in its leanings and struck an uncompromising anti-Communist note from day one.
By the late 1990s, however, it started backing Mamata Banerjee and unabashedly cheered her ascension to power in 2011.
But when the Trinamool parted ways with the Congress — the two parties fought and defeated the Left Front in 2011 as allies — The Telegraph also turned against Banerjee.
Poor poll predictions: The paper infamously forecast the demise of the Left Front in the 2001 and 2006 assembly elections.
It predicted that the Trinamool would get a drubbing in the 2016 assembly elections and would be defeated by the Left-Congress alliance.
Aveek Sarkar invested a lot of political capital in the defeat of the Trinamool despite most forecasts giving a comfortable victory to the Trinamool.
The last decade: The Telegraph turned into a trenchant critic of Banerjee and the Trinamool government during 2011-16.
However, when the funds began to dry up, it held back on its strong criticism of Banerjee, her party, and her government.
In fact, it turned into a moderate supporter of the Trinamool government and reserved all its vitriol for Modi and the BJP.
Since 2014, it has been ridiculing Modi, who had inflicted a crushing defeat on the Congress.
The fall: Aveek Sarkar had to step down and the editor of the paper's elder brother, Anandabazar Patrika, also resigned under controversial circumstances amid police summons in June 2020.
It lost all sense of proportion and objectivity in its contempt and ugly animosity towards Modi and the BJP.
It has seen its paid readership shrink drastically, and during the pandemic, it was forced to lay off many employees and drastically cut the salaries of the few it retained.
Now, only the diehard supporters of the Congress laud the paper for its biased coverage.
The paper faltered and fell because of the inherent biases, and idiosyncrasies, of its woolly headed editors dwelling in ivory towers.
There’s no guarantee that it will survive another decade to mark its golden jubilee.
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