This follows the local media cornering the Left and its government almost every other day.

“If what our intelligence reports say on such activity is found serious enough, the Central Government would be informed,” VS Achuthanandan told the Assembly today. He was responding to a submission from opposition MLA K Babu taking off from a question raised on 5 March, seeking to know if the government believed that the CIA was behind the media syndicate in the state.

VS added that he would “neither deny nor confirm” findings about a media syndicate operating in the state. His response today was also a sequel to his remarks in the Assembly last fortnight, when he talked about indications that a section of the media was being controlled by a foreign agency. He had stridently refused to disclose the details claiming that would affect “international relations”. The Kerala Union of Working Journalists had been raising a din, daring VS to come out with the details, but he claimed in the Assembly today that his words had been “misinterpreted”. His government, he maintained, was all for a free press.

Talking to The Indian Express, Additional DGP Jacob Punnoose, who heads the state intelligence department, refused to disclose what his department had found out and reported about the CIA-media links in Kerala, and its extent. “We are Kerala’s intelligence agency, the CIA is the US’s intelligence agency. It is standard practice the world over for intelligence agencies not to disclose what they find out about each other’s activities, which would be a give away,” he claimed.

It was Pinarayi Vijayan, CPM state secretary and VS’s arch party foe who first talked a month ago about the “Media Syndicate”, a supposed bourgeois apparition that he blames directly for news the party leadership could do without. And less directly, for putting VS on a pedestal and pitting him against the state party leadership. He had alleged that this Syndicate was behind the selective hounding of himself and his men like Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan. He had also not minced no words about the media trying to use VS to spite him and ruin the party.

For good measure, KEN Kunhahmed, a noted theoretician in the Pinarayi camp, had kicked up a row openly alleging that VS was increasingly a creation of the state’s rightist media with a clear agenda; a spectre “dangerously” trying to appropriate the party’s brand equity for himself.

Significantly, the making of VS in the state media has had its many contradictions, even as the man himself had carried a reasonably seamless consistency in approach and postures into the CM’s job, from his rabble rousing days as Opposition leader. Till some nine months ago, VS was the media’s pet neighbourhood pariah waving a hardline sickle at poor farmers who switched from unremunerative paddy to cash crops. He was almost the Red albatross around developing Kerala’s neck, incorrigible Stalinist beyond redemption.

The same VS was soon the antithesis of all that. He was since repackaged with a halo many shades more pristine Red than his rivals, taken around as idealist holding the fort against “invading MNCs”, as an undiluted antidote to “neo-liberal decadence” in the party, and as model for his rivals straddling the much denied Rs 4000 crore worth of prime assets the party famously holds.

No matter if the same media is also showing some unprecedented interest lately in his acolytes-turned-detractors like leading writer Sara Joseph, Naxalite-turned-social activist K Ajitha and others who are now openly gunning for VS for “capitulating” to accept a loan from the Asian Development Bank , after leading the often bloody fight against the idea for many years till he became CM.