Two Newspapers Make A Serious Mistake. One Apologises, Other Doesn't
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-09-14 14:12:40
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
View all posts by this Author
The Hindu carried a full front page advertisement for Dera Sacha Sauda on September 12 in its Delhi, Mohali and North India editions. The ad was titled "What is Dera Sacha Sauda? (Facts vs Fiction)". It ran as a set of loaded questions followed by convenient answers. It suggested that a "conspiracy" by "drug mafias and forces opposed to the Dera" lay behind the case against Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, a rape convict a CBI court sentenced to twenty years in 2017. It cited the Dera's own numbers on trees planted, blood donated and addicts freed, with no attribution and no verification.
Dainik Bhaskar's Delhi edition ran the identical advertisement in Hindi on the same day, on its front page. Reports on the ad note it carried a disclaimer stating that the two newspapers had "no editorial or journalistic involvement" in its content and that it was published "for representation purposes only". That disclaimer did nothing to stop the backlash against either paper.
The backlash was swift. By September 13, The Hindu had published a front page apology calling its own advertisement "deeply offensive" and tendering an "unconditional apology to its readers". That is the correct response, and it should be acknowledged as such. Dainik Bhaskar, having run the same advertisement to the same effect, has issued no comparable statement. That asymmetry is itself worth examining, because it says something about how differently these two publications regard front page accountability, even when the failure was identical.
An apology, in any case, is not an explanation. It tells readers what went wrong. It does not tell them why the newspaper's own systems failed to catch it before the presses ran, and silence tells readers even less.
The advertising department does not answer to the editor
Every large newspaper draws a line between its editorial desk and its advertising sales desk. This is not an accident. It is meant to protect the newsroom's independence from commercial pressure. The advertising desk sells space. It does not, in most newspapers, report to the editor-in-chief on a day to day basis. It reports up its own commercial hierarchy, which answers for revenue, not for content.
That separation is sound in principle. It becomes a liability the moment nobody on the commercial side is required to run a front page advertisement past a content check before booking it. A full front page ad is not a two column classified. It is the single most visible piece of real estate a newspaper owns. Treating its approval as a routine commercial transaction, cleared by whoever signs off on space bookings, is where this failure begins.
The scale of the purchase should have raised the scale of the scrutiny, not lowered it. A two column classified carries little reputational weight; if it turns out to be wrong or in poor taste, most readers never notice it. A full front page is the opposite. It is the most valuable, most visible space the newspaper sells, precisely because it borrows the authority of the masthead above it. A newspaper cannot reasonably charge a premium for that authority and then argue, when the content turns out to be indefensible, that selling the space carried no responsibility for what filled it. The bigger the sale, the greater the exposure it creates, and the greater the scrutiny it should have demanded before it was confirmed.
If not the editor, then who
Once editorial is ruled out, the honest question is who was actually deciding. What is striking is the absence of any widely recognised industry-wide mechanism in India that routinely subjects high-profile paid advertising to the kind of independent content scrutiny readers might expect before it occupies a newspaper's front page. The Indian Newspaper Society, the body that represents newspaper owners, is chiefly concerned with agency accreditation, rate discipline and commercial disputes between publications and agencies, not with what an advertisement is permitted to say.
If editorial genuinely had no role in accepting this advertisement, as the separation between newsroom and advertising desk would suggest, then responsibility for the decision must lie somewhere within the commercial or management chain that approved the booking. That is the more useful way to frame the question. It does not require knowing exactly which desk or which individual signed off. It only requires acknowledging that the decision was made, that it was made outside editorial's reach, and that whoever made it answered to revenue, not to readers.
What an internal check would have caught
The ad made a specific factual claim about a court verdict being the product of a conspiracy by unnamed "drug mafias". A basic content or legal check would have raised an obvious question: was there any factual basis for presenting the court's findings as the product of a conspiracy? The Hindu's own reporters have covered the Ram Rahim conviction and the murder of the journalist who first exposed the Dera. A newspaper that has published that reporting cannot plausibly claim it had no way of knowing the ad contradicted its own record.
This points to one of two possibilities. Either no legal or editorial vetting process exists for paid advertisements of this scale, or such a process exists on paper and was not applied here. Both are serious. The first is a structural gap. The second is a lapse in enforcing a rule that should never be optional for front page space.
"It is an advertisement" is not a defence
Both newspapers ran the ad with language distancing themselves from its content, stating they had no editorial involvement and that it was published purely for representation. Newspapers routinely draw this line, telling readers that an advertisement carries the views of the advertiser, not the publication. But that defence weakens with every inch of prominence the ad is given. A boxed notice on an inside page reads as paid content. A full front page, above the masthead's usual news hierarchy, reads as endorsement to most readers, whatever the disclaimer says. The Hindu's own apology implicitly concedes this. It did not say readers misunderstood the ad's status. It said the ad itself was "deeply offensive" and should not have run, disclaimer notwithstanding.
The exchange4media report on this episode raised the sharper version of this question: does labelling content as an advertisement absolve a publisher of responsibility for accepting it in the first place. The answer, on the evidence of The Hindu's own apology, is no. The Hindu did not defend its right to carry paid content indiscriminately behind a disclaimer. It admitted the content should have been refused. Dainik Bhaskar ran the same disclaimer on the same ad and has, so far, drawn the opposite conclusion by saying nothing at all.
The cost to credibility is not measured in one apology
A newspaper's front page is where it stakes its authority every single day. Readers who have followed the Ram Rahim case for years, including through The Hindu's own coverage, opened Saturday's paper to find the newspaper's most prominent space handed to arguments for the convict's innocence. The fact that it appeared as an advertisement will not fully register with most readers. What will register is that a paper regarded as a serious, credible institution let this happen.
One apology, however unconditional, corrects the record for readers who see it. It does not answer the institutional question of whether the newspaper's advertising acceptance process has any content safeguard worth the name. Until The Hindu says publicly what changes it is making to how front page advertisements are vetted, this apology settles the immediate embarrassment and leaves the underlying gap exactly where it was.
Dainik Bhaskar's silence leaves an even larger gap. A newspaper that ran the identical advertisement, took the identical criticism, and offered its readers nothing in return has told them, by omission, that this is not a matter it considers worth addressing.
But the deeper issue outlasts both newspapers' individual responses. What does a reader reasonably understand when something occupies the front page of a newspaper they trust? Even when technically labelled advertising, front page placement borrows the newspaper's authority, whatever disclaimer runs alongside it. A newspaper cannot lend its most authoritative space to a claim and then retreat behind the word "advertisement" when readers question what it chose to sell. Editorial independence from advertisers does not mean institutional indifference to what advertisers are allowed to buy. Readers of both papers are entitled to know what safeguard, if any, will stand between the next advertiser and their front page.
