Selling news or selling souls?

While banks, the world over, are going bust, getting bailed out, or facing the worst economic crisis the world has seen this side of World War II, if someone tells us one particular bank is insulated from the crisis and then goes to explain the reasons for that bank’s marvelously rosy future, we can smell a rat.

And rat is exactly what I am smelling at the moment after having read this article on rediff.com about why HDFC bank is unlikely to be hit by the current global financial crisis. One scan through the said article is enough to realize that it reads like paid-for content. While paid advertisements are fine (since they are supposed to be clearly identifiable as such), paid content is a abhorrent practice that needs to be relegated to the darkest, lowest corners of journalism hell.

It is a sad reflection on the state of affairs at rediff.com that a site which hosted columnists like Sucheta Dalal who wrote, on this very site, against the ‘mal’practice of “selling news”, seems to have now resorted to same tactics.

Terrible!