Notice a factual bloomer about the Northeast in any publication? Write to us and we will carry it on our site. Mind it, we are not hankering after typos or errors that creep in due to plain oversight. Everyone makes mistakes. But, what we would only want to highlight are mistakes made due to sheer ignorance. Make sure that you substantiate your argument/claim. Write to northeast@graffiti.net with "MEDIAWATCH" in the subject.

The following articles have appeared in past issues of Northeast Vigil and elsewhere.

A veteran journalist -- T Brajamani Singh -- is assassinated in Imphal. The editor of the English daily, Manipur News, was also president of the All-Manipur Journalists Association. Five days later, militants exploded a powerful bomb in the premises of Lamyamba, a monthly journal. Clearly, some people see scribes to be a pain in their neck.

If it had happened in a major city of the Hindi heartland, then the press would have been charging all over the place, breathing righteous indignation and fire and brimstone at the government. Nothing of the sort happened here to the shame of the "national" press.

The Manipur government's crackdown on an octogenerian social activist and a journalist for the alleged seditious actions means only one thing: when you cannot tackle militants, all you must do is gun for those who have all along stayed away from the militant way of conveying opinions and views. Whosoever is not a lackey of the Wahengbam Nipamacha Singh government must be an enemy of the State. Nipamacha Singh's subsequent decision to clamp down the archaic Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act, 1911 in the Valley distrticts gives one the impression that the state must really be full of enemies of the State.

It was heartening to see mediapersons being the panelists at a forum on the role of the media. In a random survey of various seminars held on the issue in New Delhi in recent times, one found that among the speakers jurists accounted for 35 per cent, bureaucrats accounted for 35 per cent, politicians were 20 per cent, and mediapersons only 10 per cent. The mediapersons who usually speak at such fora usually belong to the management cadre in media establishments.

The media is very important nowadays and everybody is looking for information on the superhighway. Development of science and technology has increased the scope of the electronic media. Still no one is stopping to look and think for more advances in the 21st century. So far, we can say that the present technology matches the present media.

The Nagaland Police has withdrawn its bloomer-ridden website. A casual visit by this writer found that the website http://www.nagapol.com could not be accessed. The organisation, Net Visions (India) Pvt Ltd, which hosted the site for Nagaland Police was contacted only for a laconic one-liner admission of as much. The New Delhi-based organisation's director, Dipin Kapur, refused to elaborate and only assured that the site would be up "soon" once again. Kapur did not say how "soon" this would be. He also did not comment on why the site had been withdrawn in the first place.