Media houses, candidates, the Election Commission and paid news made for a disturbing mix in the recently concluded assembly election in Punjab. Almost everyone agrees that the malaise of ‘paid news’ was more than ever before this time and that the monitoring agency, the EC in this case, could uncover just a small bit of it. (The Cost of Democracy) But just how big it really was became evident when the affliction took its first toll. HS Bawa, one of Punjab’s leading Punjabi journalists, quit as the bureau chief Jalandhar region for Rozana Spokesman (RS) on the ground that he was being forced to get paid news by the newspaper’s management. He could well be the country’s first journalist to do so.