It is a truism of course, that the leader or leading entity in any field where there is competition, is also a target by default for the rest. Almost by definition, their day-to-day tends to be more confrontational, more stressful, and I dare say more cynical. Indeed, it can be lonely at the top, with the potential for treachery around every corner. But while getting to the top can be relatively easy, staying there is infinitely harder.

For the best part of two decades, or a little more, the media landscape in Bangladesh has been dominated by two names from the same stable: The Daily Star and Prothom Alo, both spawned in separate wombs within the same corporate house, Transcom. TDS came first, with almost uncanny timing, in the weeks following the ouster of the President Ershad regime on December 6, 1990, that ushered in the country's first brush with democracy a few months later, through what was deemed to be the first free-and-fair elections held in independent Bangladesh. Under the able leadership of first S.M. Ali and then Mahfuz Anam, Daily Star quickly galloped ahead of the rest of the field, thanks mostly to its innovative offering of supplements, including a full-blown weekend magazine, and an ambitious youth supplement, Rising Stars, that was unlike anything this country had seen.

Today, after what feels like multiple phases of disruption following the advent of digital platforms, those same supplements, once numbering six each week, have all been discarded, migrated to an online space, or integrated within the main newspaper, like the Business page. By 1994, barely three years after launching, TDS was established as the industry leader in English, by a country mile. It had built up a loyal base among the urban, educated, elite - incidentally the one with the highest marginal propensity to consume. Advertisers loved it.

Transcom Group CEO Latifur Rahman now envisioned a vernacular using the same tactic of clever, well-designed supplements, for which he tapped Matiur Rahman, the highly respected editor of Ekota, the Communist Party mouthpiece. Prothom Alo hit newsstands in November 1998, and literally blew its competition out of the water. Today, if Bangladesh has a Paper of Record, almost no other name comes to mind. Take it from one who has witnessed the evolution of the news industry in this country, from close, intimate quarters through the best part of five decades now.

It is that same experience, coupled with a commitment to the industry, that compels me to call out the absurd allegations being levelled against the TDS-PA combine as utter nonsense. Although certain to find traction among a section of the populace, who made up the majority of the mobs that tried to storm the newspapers' offices in Kawran Bazar on four separate occasions this week.

There can always be serious critiques of the work of any news source, or its impact on the ecosystem. One undeniably troubling aspect of the pre-eminence of both Transcom newspapers is precisely that: they come from the same stable. Totally different news operations of course, but then again, somehow too similar. The way to address that though, is not to try and ban the leaders. It is to keep striving, to always do better.