The Loud Sound Of Silence

An top journalist’s arrest by the CBI was wilfully ignored by Bengal’s media

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MORE than the arrest itself, what is more newsworthy about a high-profile editor’s arrest by the CBI is the Bengali media’s virtual silence on the development. On the evening of December 20, when social media was a buzz with tweets and posts about Suman Chattopadhyay, one of Bengal’s top journalists and editor of the Bengali daily from the Times of India stable, Ei Samay, having been arres ted by the investigating agency over allegations of involvement with illegal ponzi schemes, those who tuned into news channels to verify the information were disappointed. “After receiving a Whatsapp message, I surfed TV channels but didn’t find anyone reporting it,” said a Calcutta resident. The next morning’s papers, too, were almost muted, with the leading English daily, The Telegraph, mentioning the arrest on page 7, in a quarter-column, three-para report without mentioning the editor’s name (in comparison, it carried its founding-editor M.J. Akbar’s fall from grace in the #MeToo controversy in a front page leader).