•RIJU DAVE MEHTA: How do you account for the tremendous public interest, worldwide, in the US presidential elections?

It’s been a remarkable American presidential campaign There’s dramatically more public engagement in this year’s presidential campaign than there’s been in American politics for decades. A lot of that has to do with the particularly interesting elements in the campaign: the first woman or the first non-white might be president. But a lot of it has to do with the Internet and the traffic that goes on in the Internet. And people’s swift reactions to everything that happens.

•MINI KAPOOR: Your opinion of Barack Obama?

He is phenomenal. He is a wonderful speaker and he seems to be a man of really good judgment, talking about the need for a new kind of politics, a new kind of engagement in the public. He is the most exciting new personality we’ve seen in my adult life because he’s happened so suddenly.

•RIJU DAVE MEHTA: What do you think about the blurring of lines between news and features?

Well, I don’t know what you mean by features. If you mean features on what Britney Spears was doing yesterday and where Paris Hilton is this week, I don’t regard that as news and, there’s too much of it around.

•RIJU DAVE MEHTA: How does media shape public opinion?

In the new environment, the most important ways newspapers shape opinion is by what they choose to cover and the subjects they go into deeply. People have a lot of sources for opinion these days. I don’t know how to weigh that. Opinion is very nebulous and hard to pin down because a lot of it has to do with whether you heard the news as it happened, or just the recap of it or whether you heard about it on some discussion programme. Were you affected by the incident itself or were you affected by a later comment on it? I am no philosopher of media. My whole life has been involved with getting the story out. I’ve never worried too much about the effects of the story. I don’t think it’s our job to worry about the effects of the story. Our job is to give people information so they have the opportunity of making reasonable judgments.

... contd.