The News Minute aka TNMurasoli’s report on DMK scion Udhayanidhi Stalin’s double meaning remark about actor Trisha is a lesson in how to say nothing while appearing to report everything. Read the piece and you will learn what farmers lost this kuruvai season, how dry the Cauvery delta is, and what Karnataka’s Mekedatu project means for Tamil Nadu. What you will not learn, anywhere in the article, is what Udhayanidhi actually said.
That is the whitewash.
TNM calls it “a line that was allegedly laced with double meaning.” That phrase does two jobs at once. First, it tells the reader nothing – no reader unfamiliar with the video walks away understanding what happened or why it’s controversial. Second, the word “allegedly” quietly reopens a question that video evidence has already closed; multiple outlets, including PTI, describe Udhayanidhi pausing, smirking, and delivering the remark deliberately after the crowd chanted Trisha’s name. There is no ambiguity about whether he said something. TNM’s phrasing manufactures ambiguity anyway.
The feminists that they claim to be, did not focus on the words he said but rather the entire report focused on the political fallout, including criticism from the BJP, reactions from TVK leaders and a complaint submitted to the National Commission for Women (NCW).
The report quoted BJP state vice-president Narayanan Thirupathy describing the speech as “disgusting, obscene, vulgar and shameful” and demanding Udhayanidhi Stalin’s arrest. It also carried TVK MLA Rhevanth Charan’s criticism and detailed the representation filed by TVK national spokesperson Pazha Selvakumar before the NCW seeking action over the remarks.
However, despite extensively covering the reactions and legal demands arising from the controversy, the report did not reproduce the statement made by Udhayanidhi Stalin that prompted those reactions, instead characterising it only as an “alleged” double entendre.
Look at the architecture of the piece. It opens with the controversy, spends four paragraphs on the backlash, and then in its final third, pivots entirely back to Udhayanidhi’s own framing: the dry Cauvery, the lost kuruvai crop, the “incompetent and incapable” TVK government, farmers’ loan waivers, drought declarations. The report doesn’t end on the woman whose name was invoked without her consent in front of thousands of men. It ends on Udhayanidhi’s talking points about water policy, restated at length, unchallenged, in his own words. A reader who skims to the bottom (which is most readers) closes the article having last absorbed Udhayanidhi’s political grievances, not the reason he’s in the news today.
That’s not neutral reporting. That’s a ‘news’ organisation choosing where to spend its last, most memorable paragraph, and choosing to spend it rehabilitating the person at the centre of the row.
Notice too what’s absent structurally: no line from TNM’s own reporters characterising the remark, no editorial judgment on its nature, nothing that would require the outlet to actually describe what “double entendre” is standing in for. Every other outlet covering this story – PTI, WION, India Today, NDTV, found a way to convey the nature of the remark without reproducing it verbatim. TNM alone manages to write nearly hundreds of words about a controversy while declining to tell you what the controversy is.
This is the same reflex TNM brings to every DMK-adjacent story: soften the offence, amplify the grievance, let the party’s own framing carry the piece home. When a BJP or AIADMK leader stumbles, TNM’s headlines don’t hedge with “allegedly laced with double meaning.” When it’s the former Chief Minister’s son, apparently, precision goes out the window and the farmers’ protest becomes very convenient cover.
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