RaviSez

These are the things that seemingly are in conflict for Gaurav today. By now, most in the Blogosphere must be aware of the aggressive tactics that IIPM - a bizarre management institute, is bent on using. I, have a few questions.

1. What sort of institute is bent on behaving like Shiv Sainiks trying to force their views on what movies or books the general public is supposed to watch and read?
2. Why isnt' mainstream media(MSM) picking up the story?
3. What is IBM doing without taking a stand in favor of their employee?

Growing up in India, I am used to seeing organizations like IIPM, who spring up overnight, offering false promises to thousands and then couldn't deliver it later. It's pretty much like all the other institutes that you know about only via e-mail Spam. I am not surprised by it's tactics and I am pretty sure it will go down as soon as it has risen up.

But what bothers me is the way MSM chooses not maintain it's distance from this story. If they are worried about the advertising revenue, Michael Higgins has an excellent post about it here.
He says,

This raises an interesting economic question: how much does it cost a newspaper to lose its biggest advertiser? To answer this question, they should ask Mr. Chaudhuri, dean of IIPM, to place his head into a basin of water, (any bowl will do, even a toilet bowl), and then quickly remove it from the water. If the image of his face remains in the bowl of water, the newspaper will sorely miss this ad revenue. If the water quickly rushes in to fill the void, then one would assume that likewise many other advertisers would rush in to fill the void caused by the absence of IIPM’s advertising.

This is an important point: there really is no conflict of interest here. No newspaper needs IIPM’s advertising. In the long run, there is no better way to guarantee advertising revenue than to produce a consistently credible newspaper that covers all of the news. Any credible newspaper knows this and purposefully keeps the advertising portion of their newspaper physically separate from the reporters so that there is no interaction between them and so there is no potential for a conflict of interest. In the long run, reputation sells papers, and selling papers brings in advertisers. And the only time the reporters should consider their advertisers is when they read them and wonder: “Who are these people and why are they spending so much on advertising – what is the story here?”

I totally agree. The next point is, why the managers at IBM are giving in to IIPM much the same way as the MSM. Do they honestly believe that IIPM students burning their laptops will tarnish IBM's image and not the other way round? They should have dealt with their clout and used their lawyers to protect their employee and not giving in, to a petty client, however big their business might be worth.