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This article offers a look at the state of the elite press in India. Most English-language dailies in Indian cities include a separate city section that seems reserved exclusively for pin-ups. In the December 6, 2004 edition of The Times of India, for example, the city section of the paper known as Delhi Times had seven large pictures on the front page alone. The women in these pictures were not naked, strictly speaking, but the parade of models and starlets was unending. The Hindustan Times, the other market leader among Delhi's English-language papers with a national circulation just over one million, was the same, and its was no different in other cities. The pin-up phenomenon is only one aspect of the makeover of India's English-language press. None of the publications mentioned above are tabloids; most of them have long histories as serious newspapers, conservative in political sensibility and taste, while the language they work in restricts their audience to the upper and middle classes living in urban centers. The number of English-speakers in India is probably no more than 4 percent or 5 percent of the billion-plus population, but they are at the top of the heap, an affluent enclave of largely upper-caste Hindus.

The section praises and criticizes several news media in the U.S. as of August 2004. As the news anchor of KNXV-TV, Katie Raml has been using her professional credentials to support her personal politics. In fall 2003, she introduced the speaker at the graduation ceremonies at the Republicans' WISH List Campaign College. In spring 2004, Raml moderated a discussion and posed for pictures at a WISH List fundraiser. When Texas Governor Rick Perry announced that the state's new commissioner of education would be Shirley Neeley, he cited her performance as superintendent of the Galena Park District. Among her miracles: the district's rating had gone from acceptable to exemplary; 82 percent of students were going on to college and staying there at a commendable rate. But after examining the data, the Houston Chronicle's Rick Casey took them apart: not only were some of the numbers inflated, but in some categories had actually declined. On May 5, 2004 Willamette Week (WW) contacted Neil Goldschmidt, the chairman of the State Board of Higher Education to offer him the chance to defend himself against the findings of an investigation that when Goldschmidt was mayor, he had regularly had sex with a 14-year-old babysitter. On May 6, 2004 after Goldschmidt had announced his resignation from his chairmanships because of what he said was poor health, WW posted its exposé on its Web site. The next day, a story appeared in The Oregonian: Goldschmidt had gone to the paper and confessed. It was not long before people and organizations weighed in with criticism. Among the complaints: that The Oregonian had used the word affair instead of such words as rape and crime; that it had cast the story in terms sympathetic to Goldschmidt; that it had shortened the reported period of abuse. And last, that it had buried the investigative achievement of Willamette Week in sending Goldschmidt to The Oregonian in the first place.