Veteran Journalist And Media Critic GS Bhargava Dies

 Veteran journalist G.S. Bhargava, former resident editor of The Indian Express, died in New Delhi today. He was 85 years old and succumbed to throat cancer. Bhargava was a media critic and wrote the popular Blue Pencil column that critiqued the print media and ran in The Pioneer. The Editor’s Guild mourned his death. “Blue Pencil, his column on media reporting, was looked forward to by journalists with both eagerness and uneasiness, as he was fair, but strict on the norms of journalism and writing skills,” the Guild said in a statement. “His media column Blue Pencil was very popular,” said Outlook editor-in-chief Vinod Mehta, who commissioned the column while he was the editor of The Pioneer. It appeared every Sunday for about two years. He used to get a lot of bouqets and brickbats for the column and I used to get a lot of flak as well because you were criticising your fellow editors and a lot of people in the media tend to be sensitive to criticism. I asked him to include The Pioneer in his reviews and he wrote columns criticising some of our work as well,” Mehta reminisced.