India politics thread
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik and Imran hold a long overdue conversation about United's awful league form with 1 win in 7. They discuss a disappointing draw at Bournemouth, a not so disappointing draw against Liverpool and a crushing defeat at Chelsea - Is time nearly over for Erik Ten Hag?
Then in a special second half of the pod, Nik welcomes Natalie ( https://twitter.com/natalie_17) to discuss the fortunes of Manchester United Women as they booked a place in the FA Cup Final after a historic first ever win vs. Chelsea.
It's utter madness. Both China and India needs to step back.
It's also pure comedy. Indian media has stated that Taiwan shot down a Chinese fighter aircraft to the utter confusion and fury of the Taiwanese.
Their defense ministry has categorically denied that anything of that sort ever happened. Now some in the Indian social media won't believe this never happened and are furious with Taiwan for denying it.
It's also pure comedy. Indian media has stated that Taiwan shot down a Chinese fighter aircraft to the utter confusion and fury of the Taiwanese.
Their defense ministry has categorically denied that anything of that sort ever happened. Now some in the Indian social media won't believe this never happened and are furious with Taiwan for denying it.
Taiwanese are anti-nationals, send them to pakistan.
Amazing
I am guessing posters on here don't understand that healthcare is not a federal but a state responsibility in India.
Maharashtra under Thackeray jr is the worst managed region in the entire world on covid.
The central government enforced a shutdown relatively early which is why India's cases in March and April were extremely low for its population. The fact that Mah in September still hasn't been able to bring it under control (20% positivity after 6 months) is completely crazy stuff.
People and media from Mah should be up in arms but no one really seems to care.
Maharashtra under Thackeray jr is the worst managed region in the entire world on covid.
The central government enforced a shutdown relatively early which is why India's cases in March and April were extremely low for its population. The fact that Mah in September still hasn't been able to bring it under control (20% positivity after 6 months) is completely crazy stuff.
People and media from Mah should be up in arms but no one really seems to care.
People celebrated what Cuomo did in NY for no reason at all (30k death,s and he is wrting a book on control), and people are forgiving Thackeray for no reason at all.
And i thought shiv aroor was one of the good ones. Although in his defense one could say rahul kanwal forced him to do it.
Do viewers actually like this shit ? Couldn't they have given the relevent information without that cringy simulator ?
Do viewers actually like this shit ? Couldn't they have given the relevent information without that cringy simulator ?
In both cases, some people are willing to excuse the state's incompetence since they don't like the national leader.
Cuomo at least was out in the public and not hiding, Thackeray is hiding and asking for divine intervention and claiming there is nothing wrong.
24k cases at 25% positivity in September ffs.
Asking for divine intervention is common in India so nothing surprising about it.
The strangest thing is that Bihar and UP are actually seemingly the most competent states, as per the data.
And there were silly articles like how Bihar was going to face a Covid-storm just a couple of months back
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53527094
As it turns out, the worst affected states are the so-called industrialized and educated states and UTs, like MAH, KAR, KER, TN, DEL and CHD; and that Nitish Kumar and Yogi seem to know how to do their job.
Actively suppressing data isn’t called being competent. At least that’s the case in UP.
‘It’s not a newsroom, it’s a durbar’: Inside the Republic of Arnab Goswami
How the media mogul’s inflated sense of self-importance, ‘nepotism’ and political partisanship drive Republic TV’s coverage – and drive away its staff.
On August 27, Tejinder Singh Sodhi took to Twitter to announce his resignation as Republic TV’s bureau chief in Jammu and Kashmir. “After writing an apology to Journalism for killing it's soul for three and a half years, I have resigned from Republic TV,” he wrote. “More details here soon.”
The “details” were subsequently published on September 1 by PGurus, with a blurb declaring that the “no-holds-barred letter” speaks of the journalist’s “horrid experience working for Republic TV”.
The letter also found its way to Twitter as most tell-all resignations now eventually do. Newslaundry reached out to several former employees at Republic TV to know their views on Tejinder’s assertions and to gauge if their experiences in the Republic TV newsroom had mirrored his.
First, a rundown of Tejinder’s claims.
‘Job of a hitman’
Tejinder’s 3,500-word email to Republic TV’s head of human resources elaborates on a range of issues he faced at the organisation. He says he joined Republic TV because its owner and chief editor, Arnab Goswami, assured him that the channel would “be the voice of the downtrodden”. But Tejinder says he soon realised that the reporters were being used to carry out hit jobs on behalf of Arnab.
He talks about how he was told to ambush Sunanda Pushkar’s father and get him to blame her husband, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, for her death. He also says his prime job as the Jammu and Kashmir bureau chief was to “target and speak against Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti”, former chief ministers of the erstwhile state. He did that job well, he adds, and “ensured to project them as anti-national and find fault in whatever they say”.
In a conversation with Newslaundry, Tejinder confirms that the email doing the rounds online is penned by him. He says he wrote it at great professional risk, knowing that speaking out against a former employer could render him unemployable in a news industry that’s governed by an Omerta — journalists rarely speak about the goings-on in their companies or newsrooms.
“Someone had to do it,” he tells Newslaundry. “This was not journalism, what we were doing. This was a hit job. The first time I realised this was when I was asked to protest outside the Congress office with black bands and placards.” He adds, “My job was that of a hitman – to find out what Omar Abdullah is saying, to find out what Mehbooba Mufti is saying, find fault in it, and report that they are anti-national.”
As in Bollywood movies, editors at Republic TV have a name for this kind of reporting; it’s called the “chase sequence”. The reporters are told to chase down people, usually opposition leaders, thrust their mics in their faces, and demand answers. Tejinder says he was never explicitly told that the BJP was a holy cow, but it was understood in the way stories were chosen and dropped. He alleges that a story on illegal constructions by politicians near an Army ammunition dump in Nagrota, Jammu, was never aired even though he had Army spokespersons confirming it on record. Incidentally, the story was reported by the Indian Express. The leaders in question included BJP’s Nirmal Singh and Kavinder Gupta, both former deputy chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir. Tejinder cites this as an example of Republic TV’s fake nationalism.
In his resignation letter, Tejinder talks about nepotism within Republic TV. He claims that Arnab’s wife, Samyabrata Ray, practically heads the operations of both its Hindi and English channels. “He calls Sonia Gandhi the super prime minister,” Tejinder says of Arnab, “but his wife is really the super editor and managing director in the organisation. Though now she holds the position of senior executive editor, she is the one deciding everything.”
Samyabrata has previously worked with the Telegraph, ANI and Tehelka. She is editor and co-owner of Republic TV.
Durbar culture
Newslaundry reached out to senior editors, anchors and reporters who have left Republic TV to understand their reasons for leaving and what they made of Tejinder’s allegations. Newslaundry is aware that a story based on anonymous sources can often be tricky to present but most of those who chose to speak with us did not wish to be named for fear of being seen as “troublemakers”. They feared that they could be rendered unemployable if they spoke out openly about their previous employer. Some were willing to be named in this report but were denied permission by their current employers. Most media houses in India have strict rules against their employees speaking to other news organisations, which makes it doubly difficult to report on the media.
Several of the people we spoke to have worked closely with Arnab.
One person remarked that Tejinder’s email illustrated precisely why there were few experienced professionals in the business who’d like to work for Arnab. “What he’s built with Republic TV is not a newsroom, it’s a durbar. Usually, you have juniors, mid-level and senior managers in an organisation. He’s filled the newsroom with young kids who cannot stand up to him, even as most experienced hands at Republic TV have left.”
The person noted a distinct change in Arnab after the 2019 Lok Sabha election. “He has become increasingly vicious as have his panellists. He has nothing good to say about anyone. Beyond a point, it became embarrassing, this brand of theatrics in the news, and the constant screaming and shouting. He was obsessed with beating Aaj Tak, which he did, but at the cost of losing any credibility at all as a news person.”
A former senior anchor argued that when experienced professionals and the cream of the organisation are leaving one by one, you have to pause and think.
The anchor said the environment at Republic TV was “toxic and negative”.
“There is complete disregard for a person’s personal life,” the anchor added. “You can get calls at 1 am just to be shouted at. There are impossible demands from the reporters to chase a person even if he has agreed to speak to you, heckle or provoke a reaction.”
This anchor also pointed out those who signed up to work in television were aware of how gruelling it could be and prepared to work hard. “I can’t say any of us left because we couldn’t work hard or keep up with the pace. We gave our best. But there’s also the problem that if you begin getting noticed in the organisation for your work, you will be snubbed. He may know of your potential, but the man is born with a trust deficit, and he has a coterie around him that feeds into it,” the anchor said, adding that if anyone did well, the people around would start feeling insecure.
“In that sense, there’s only a certain level to which you can rise in the organisation and you have to make your peace with it.”
Aditya Raj Kaul, who was a top editor and reporter at Republic TV, said he wouldn’t comment on Tejinder’s email, but would vouch for him as a committed reporter. “He may be a bit too emotional but that surely can’t be held against him. I had persuaded him to give TV a chance back then when he had a comfortable job in PTI. I resigned from Republic as senior associate editor and senior anchor on December 31, 2018. I made a commitment to Arnab that the purpose of my resignation was not to defame him or his channel, and I stand by that even today. Though I have never regretted resigning from Republic TV.”
‘Are we going to be number fecking one or what?’
A common theme that emerged from our conversations with former Republic TV employees is the emphasis on sting operations. A former Republic TV anchor who is now at another major English news channel said she was once told to sting her source. “They would give us instructions like, ‘Wire yourself up and meet your source’. Why would you do that? A source becomes a source because of a certain trust that you develop with them, you have to protect their identity, not expose them. Just imagine what young journalism graduates are being taught there: basically that it’s okay to throw your source under the bus, secretly tape them and reveal their identity even if they don’t want you to do that.”
In a recent “sting operation” on Sushant Singh Rajput’s fitness trainer, the Republic TV reporter says right at the beginning, “It’s off the record, I am not filing it.” What’s being presented here as an exposé seems like an off-the-record conversation between a journalist and a source. It is not an undercover operation. Moreover, traditionally, undercover investigations are treated as the last resort in journalism. There also has to be an overriding public interest when a news outlet decides to go down this route.
The anchor quoted above was part of the channel’s founding team, but left soon afterwards. The last straw was when she was forced to reveal her source. “I had some information on a certain politician from a very credible source but this was more to do with the politician’s personal life. When I discussed this information with Arnab and his wife, they got very excited. They bullied me into revealing the source, saying if I didn't tell them, they would go on air and ask who was feeding this information to Republic TV reporters,” she said. “Then they demanded that I get the source to meet Arnab. I said, ‘No way would the source want to meet Arnab’, to which I was told things like I should know who I was talking to and that PMs and CMs are scared of Arnab. It got pretty ugly; I just went out for a walk and never came back.”
The anchor painted Arnab as the archetype media mogul consumed by self-importance. “I think in his head, he’s the most powerful person in India after Modi. I remember this time when Arnab once came out of his office at 12:30 am and screamed, ‘Are we going to be number fecking one or what?’ We’d all chime in to say, ‘Yes’. He’d go, ‘I didn’t fecking hear you.’ And we’d loudly say yes and clap. When he addressed the office in one of his speeches, you couldn’t sit. If you smiled, he’d single you out.”
The anchor said she had a particularly hard time adjusting to the work environment. “It was an insane place to work at. Every day, the edit meeting would get over at 2:30 am and you would be asked to report back at 7:30 am. We never got weekly offs. We would sleep in the office, sometimes get woken up at 3:30 am to shoot promos. I wanted to leave the office once because I had a running temperature, I was simply told to take a pill and stay on.”
A former reporter had similar experiences to speak about when it came to stings. “You are given mindless directions to just sting people, even if they are willing to talk to you or even when you can get that information on record. I was just told to sting students of a particular university. I left Republic TV within a brief time of joining. I knew this wasn’t for me.”
The reporter said it shouldn’t take people years to figure out that what is happening at that channel is not journalism.
News agenda
Shweta Kothari was a founding member of the Special Investigative Team at Republic TV. The team was headed by Prema Sridevi, who too has left and is set to launch her own venture. Shweta, currently managing editor at the Logical Indian, highlighted the paranoia that pervades her former workplace.
“I was accused of being a spy for Shashi Tharoor,” she said. “This was around the time when the channel was launched and we were chasing Tharoor on the Sunanda Pushkar story. When I confronted Arnab on this, he simply told me, ‘We are trying to protect you and keep you off stories on someone you are close to.’ I have no idea what he meant by that.”
Shweta suspected that it was because Tharoor followed her on Twitter.
“The one thing that came up was that I had signed a change.org petition to make Tharoor the chief of the Congress maybe sometime in 2014. But there was no way of knowing that unless they went through my emails,” she said.
Shweta had joined Republic TV from NDTV and had clearly told Arnab in her interview that she was not Right-leaning. “He and his wife both assured me that with their own brand, their aim was to do right by India and the armed forces. I thought since he was no longer with Times Now, Republic TV would be built differently.”
This was echoed by other people who had agreed to work with Arnab despite his pro-BJP tilt from 2014 onwards. “I left Times Now to work with Arnab because, until the time he was there, at least he never pressured us directly, he never told you that you could not do this story because it was against the BJP. Navika started doing that more openly. But things changed drastically at Republic in 2019, earlier I could at least push some stories across,” said a former Republic TV anchor-editor.
By way of an example, she recalled a banking scam that she had been covering. “They wanted me to pin the blame on Congress MLAs who were not involved in the scam but were in fact trying to bail out certain people. They played up pictures of the accused with some non-BJP leaders saying they were hand in glove. When I sent them pictures of the accused with BJP leaders, there was radio silence.”
The anchor-editor said when it came to interviews with opposition leaders, the staffers were expected to be uncivil. “If it’s a regular, sitdown interview, it doesn’t work. They want you to be rude to people because that’s more drama, right? The reporters are supposed to chase people and it’s not about asking hard-hitting questions but being rude.”
As far as pre-deciding a story, Shweta said she had her first experience in the early months of the channel’s launch. She was told to conduct a sting operation on what Kashmiri Muslims thought of Kashmir Pandits returning to the valley. “I travelled village to village and I got a bunch of people to say they would welcome Pandits. There were some people, mostly people who had picked up the gun at some point, who talked about taking part in violence against Pandits. I must have spoken to 50 people, 20 on camera, out of which three or four said the things Arnab wanted to show — hate against Pandits. People who spoke of a hope for peace with their exiled Kashmiri brethren were never aired.”
A battle for TRPs
According to the latest BARC data, Republic Bharat has displaced Aaj Tak as the Hindi TV news channel with the highest ratings. It is this battle for TRPs that has perhaps resulted in some of the ugliest TV moments of the past month. On the one hand, you had Republic Bharat anchors heckling ordinary folks outside Rhea Chakrobarty’s house and, on the other, an Aaj Tak reporter’s blatant invasion of a citizen’s privacy.
In this context, a former employee at Republic Bharat said, “I am not very taken in by this urge to single out Arnab as the worst thing that’s happened to TV news. Who’s any different? Turn on any news channel, and they are selling ‘rastravaad’ and ‘Hindu-Muslim’. I was very clear when I joined Republic Bharat that this was not journalism, it was jingoism. Unmaad phailane ka kaam kar rahe hain. This is the game of TRP.”
He, however, said the biggest fault in all of this was that of the viewers. “Do you know how much pressure we are in every Thursday when ratings come out? You are answerable for every little drop in ratings. But the question is why do news consumers watch this tamasha?”
Like news consumers, it appears that news professionals have also grown accustomed to the plummeting standards of what’s dished out as news on TV. Those who took the plunge with Republic TV probably knew that they wouldn't be working with a Walter Cronkite or the legendary SP Singh. The problem wasn’t that they weren’t willing to demonstrate flexibility while at the channel, it was that they weren’t willing to crawl — something that seems to be a prerequisite in Arnab’s scheme of things at Republic.
Newslaundry reached out to Arnab for comment on the allegations made by Tejinder and other former employees. This report will be updated if a response is received.
https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/09...a-durbar-inside-the-republic-of-arnab-goswami
How the media mogul’s inflated sense of self-importance, ‘nepotism’ and political partisanship drive Republic TV’s coverage – and drive away its staff.
On August 27, Tejinder Singh Sodhi took to Twitter to announce his resignation as Republic TV’s bureau chief in Jammu and Kashmir. “After writing an apology to Journalism for killing it's soul for three and a half years, I have resigned from Republic TV,” he wrote. “More details here soon.”
The “details” were subsequently published on September 1 by PGurus, with a blurb declaring that the “no-holds-barred letter” speaks of the journalist’s “horrid experience working for Republic TV”.
The letter also found its way to Twitter as most tell-all resignations now eventually do. Newslaundry reached out to several former employees at Republic TV to know their views on Tejinder’s assertions and to gauge if their experiences in the Republic TV newsroom had mirrored his.
First, a rundown of Tejinder’s claims.
‘Job of a hitman’
Tejinder’s 3,500-word email to Republic TV’s head of human resources elaborates on a range of issues he faced at the organisation. He says he joined Republic TV because its owner and chief editor, Arnab Goswami, assured him that the channel would “be the voice of the downtrodden”. But Tejinder says he soon realised that the reporters were being used to carry out hit jobs on behalf of Arnab.
He talks about how he was told to ambush Sunanda Pushkar’s father and get him to blame her husband, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, for her death. He also says his prime job as the Jammu and Kashmir bureau chief was to “target and speak against Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti”, former chief ministers of the erstwhile state. He did that job well, he adds, and “ensured to project them as anti-national and find fault in whatever they say”.
In a conversation with Newslaundry, Tejinder confirms that the email doing the rounds online is penned by him. He says he wrote it at great professional risk, knowing that speaking out against a former employer could render him unemployable in a news industry that’s governed by an Omerta — journalists rarely speak about the goings-on in their companies or newsrooms.
“Someone had to do it,” he tells Newslaundry. “This was not journalism, what we were doing. This was a hit job. The first time I realised this was when I was asked to protest outside the Congress office with black bands and placards.” He adds, “My job was that of a hitman – to find out what Omar Abdullah is saying, to find out what Mehbooba Mufti is saying, find fault in it, and report that they are anti-national.”
As in Bollywood movies, editors at Republic TV have a name for this kind of reporting; it’s called the “chase sequence”. The reporters are told to chase down people, usually opposition leaders, thrust their mics in their faces, and demand answers. Tejinder says he was never explicitly told that the BJP was a holy cow, but it was understood in the way stories were chosen and dropped. He alleges that a story on illegal constructions by politicians near an Army ammunition dump in Nagrota, Jammu, was never aired even though he had Army spokespersons confirming it on record. Incidentally, the story was reported by the Indian Express. The leaders in question included BJP’s Nirmal Singh and Kavinder Gupta, both former deputy chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir. Tejinder cites this as an example of Republic TV’s fake nationalism.
In his resignation letter, Tejinder talks about nepotism within Republic TV. He claims that Arnab’s wife, Samyabrata Ray, practically heads the operations of both its Hindi and English channels. “He calls Sonia Gandhi the super prime minister,” Tejinder says of Arnab, “but his wife is really the super editor and managing director in the organisation. Though now she holds the position of senior executive editor, she is the one deciding everything.”
Samyabrata has previously worked with the Telegraph, ANI and Tehelka. She is editor and co-owner of Republic TV.
Durbar culture
Newslaundry reached out to senior editors, anchors and reporters who have left Republic TV to understand their reasons for leaving and what they made of Tejinder’s allegations. Newslaundry is aware that a story based on anonymous sources can often be tricky to present but most of those who chose to speak with us did not wish to be named for fear of being seen as “troublemakers”. They feared that they could be rendered unemployable if they spoke out openly about their previous employer. Some were willing to be named in this report but were denied permission by their current employers. Most media houses in India have strict rules against their employees speaking to other news organisations, which makes it doubly difficult to report on the media.
Several of the people we spoke to have worked closely with Arnab.
One person remarked that Tejinder’s email illustrated precisely why there were few experienced professionals in the business who’d like to work for Arnab. “What he’s built with Republic TV is not a newsroom, it’s a durbar. Usually, you have juniors, mid-level and senior managers in an organisation. He’s filled the newsroom with young kids who cannot stand up to him, even as most experienced hands at Republic TV have left.”
The person noted a distinct change in Arnab after the 2019 Lok Sabha election. “He has become increasingly vicious as have his panellists. He has nothing good to say about anyone. Beyond a point, it became embarrassing, this brand of theatrics in the news, and the constant screaming and shouting. He was obsessed with beating Aaj Tak, which he did, but at the cost of losing any credibility at all as a news person.”
A former senior anchor argued that when experienced professionals and the cream of the organisation are leaving one by one, you have to pause and think.
The anchor said the environment at Republic TV was “toxic and negative”.
“There is complete disregard for a person’s personal life,” the anchor added. “You can get calls at 1 am just to be shouted at. There are impossible demands from the reporters to chase a person even if he has agreed to speak to you, heckle or provoke a reaction.”
This anchor also pointed out those who signed up to work in television were aware of how gruelling it could be and prepared to work hard. “I can’t say any of us left because we couldn’t work hard or keep up with the pace. We gave our best. But there’s also the problem that if you begin getting noticed in the organisation for your work, you will be snubbed. He may know of your potential, but the man is born with a trust deficit, and he has a coterie around him that feeds into it,” the anchor said, adding that if anyone did well, the people around would start feeling insecure.
“In that sense, there’s only a certain level to which you can rise in the organisation and you have to make your peace with it.”
Aditya Raj Kaul, who was a top editor and reporter at Republic TV, said he wouldn’t comment on Tejinder’s email, but would vouch for him as a committed reporter. “He may be a bit too emotional but that surely can’t be held against him. I had persuaded him to give TV a chance back then when he had a comfortable job in PTI. I resigned from Republic as senior associate editor and senior anchor on December 31, 2018. I made a commitment to Arnab that the purpose of my resignation was not to defame him or his channel, and I stand by that even today. Though I have never regretted resigning from Republic TV.”
‘Are we going to be number fecking one or what?’
A common theme that emerged from our conversations with former Republic TV employees is the emphasis on sting operations. A former Republic TV anchor who is now at another major English news channel said she was once told to sting her source. “They would give us instructions like, ‘Wire yourself up and meet your source’. Why would you do that? A source becomes a source because of a certain trust that you develop with them, you have to protect their identity, not expose them. Just imagine what young journalism graduates are being taught there: basically that it’s okay to throw your source under the bus, secretly tape them and reveal their identity even if they don’t want you to do that.”
In a recent “sting operation” on Sushant Singh Rajput’s fitness trainer, the Republic TV reporter says right at the beginning, “It’s off the record, I am not filing it.” What’s being presented here as an exposé seems like an off-the-record conversation between a journalist and a source. It is not an undercover operation. Moreover, traditionally, undercover investigations are treated as the last resort in journalism. There also has to be an overriding public interest when a news outlet decides to go down this route.
The anchor quoted above was part of the channel’s founding team, but left soon afterwards. The last straw was when she was forced to reveal her source. “I had some information on a certain politician from a very credible source but this was more to do with the politician’s personal life. When I discussed this information with Arnab and his wife, they got very excited. They bullied me into revealing the source, saying if I didn't tell them, they would go on air and ask who was feeding this information to Republic TV reporters,” she said. “Then they demanded that I get the source to meet Arnab. I said, ‘No way would the source want to meet Arnab’, to which I was told things like I should know who I was talking to and that PMs and CMs are scared of Arnab. It got pretty ugly; I just went out for a walk and never came back.”
The anchor painted Arnab as the archetype media mogul consumed by self-importance. “I think in his head, he’s the most powerful person in India after Modi. I remember this time when Arnab once came out of his office at 12:30 am and screamed, ‘Are we going to be number fecking one or what?’ We’d all chime in to say, ‘Yes’. He’d go, ‘I didn’t fecking hear you.’ And we’d loudly say yes and clap. When he addressed the office in one of his speeches, you couldn’t sit. If you smiled, he’d single you out.”
The anchor said she had a particularly hard time adjusting to the work environment. “It was an insane place to work at. Every day, the edit meeting would get over at 2:30 am and you would be asked to report back at 7:30 am. We never got weekly offs. We would sleep in the office, sometimes get woken up at 3:30 am to shoot promos. I wanted to leave the office once because I had a running temperature, I was simply told to take a pill and stay on.”
A former reporter had similar experiences to speak about when it came to stings. “You are given mindless directions to just sting people, even if they are willing to talk to you or even when you can get that information on record. I was just told to sting students of a particular university. I left Republic TV within a brief time of joining. I knew this wasn’t for me.”
The reporter said it shouldn’t take people years to figure out that what is happening at that channel is not journalism.
News agenda
Shweta Kothari was a founding member of the Special Investigative Team at Republic TV. The team was headed by Prema Sridevi, who too has left and is set to launch her own venture. Shweta, currently managing editor at the Logical Indian, highlighted the paranoia that pervades her former workplace.
“I was accused of being a spy for Shashi Tharoor,” she said. “This was around the time when the channel was launched and we were chasing Tharoor on the Sunanda Pushkar story. When I confronted Arnab on this, he simply told me, ‘We are trying to protect you and keep you off stories on someone you are close to.’ I have no idea what he meant by that.”
Shweta suspected that it was because Tharoor followed her on Twitter.
“The one thing that came up was that I had signed a change.org petition to make Tharoor the chief of the Congress maybe sometime in 2014. But there was no way of knowing that unless they went through my emails,” she said.
Shweta had joined Republic TV from NDTV and had clearly told Arnab in her interview that she was not Right-leaning. “He and his wife both assured me that with their own brand, their aim was to do right by India and the armed forces. I thought since he was no longer with Times Now, Republic TV would be built differently.”
This was echoed by other people who had agreed to work with Arnab despite his pro-BJP tilt from 2014 onwards. “I left Times Now to work with Arnab because, until the time he was there, at least he never pressured us directly, he never told you that you could not do this story because it was against the BJP. Navika started doing that more openly. But things changed drastically at Republic in 2019, earlier I could at least push some stories across,” said a former Republic TV anchor-editor.
By way of an example, she recalled a banking scam that she had been covering. “They wanted me to pin the blame on Congress MLAs who were not involved in the scam but were in fact trying to bail out certain people. They played up pictures of the accused with some non-BJP leaders saying they were hand in glove. When I sent them pictures of the accused with BJP leaders, there was radio silence.”
The anchor-editor said when it came to interviews with opposition leaders, the staffers were expected to be uncivil. “If it’s a regular, sitdown interview, it doesn’t work. They want you to be rude to people because that’s more drama, right? The reporters are supposed to chase people and it’s not about asking hard-hitting questions but being rude.”
As far as pre-deciding a story, Shweta said she had her first experience in the early months of the channel’s launch. She was told to conduct a sting operation on what Kashmiri Muslims thought of Kashmir Pandits returning to the valley. “I travelled village to village and I got a bunch of people to say they would welcome Pandits. There were some people, mostly people who had picked up the gun at some point, who talked about taking part in violence against Pandits. I must have spoken to 50 people, 20 on camera, out of which three or four said the things Arnab wanted to show — hate against Pandits. People who spoke of a hope for peace with their exiled Kashmiri brethren were never aired.”
A battle for TRPs
According to the latest BARC data, Republic Bharat has displaced Aaj Tak as the Hindi TV news channel with the highest ratings. It is this battle for TRPs that has perhaps resulted in some of the ugliest TV moments of the past month. On the one hand, you had Republic Bharat anchors heckling ordinary folks outside Rhea Chakrobarty’s house and, on the other, an Aaj Tak reporter’s blatant invasion of a citizen’s privacy.
In this context, a former employee at Republic Bharat said, “I am not very taken in by this urge to single out Arnab as the worst thing that’s happened to TV news. Who’s any different? Turn on any news channel, and they are selling ‘rastravaad’ and ‘Hindu-Muslim’. I was very clear when I joined Republic Bharat that this was not journalism, it was jingoism. Unmaad phailane ka kaam kar rahe hain. This is the game of TRP.”
He, however, said the biggest fault in all of this was that of the viewers. “Do you know how much pressure we are in every Thursday when ratings come out? You are answerable for every little drop in ratings. But the question is why do news consumers watch this tamasha?”
Like news consumers, it appears that news professionals have also grown accustomed to the plummeting standards of what’s dished out as news on TV. Those who took the plunge with Republic TV probably knew that they wouldn't be working with a Walter Cronkite or the legendary SP Singh. The problem wasn’t that they weren’t willing to demonstrate flexibility while at the channel, it was that they weren’t willing to crawl — something that seems to be a prerequisite in Arnab’s scheme of things at Republic.
Newslaundry reached out to Arnab for comment on the allegations made by Tejinder and other former employees. This report will be updated if a response is received.
https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/09...a-durbar-inside-the-republic-of-arnab-goswami
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Keeping positivity rate below 5% is a good sign (as is the small number of reported deaths), independent of what they are suppressing. Or do you have reason to think they are doing a lot of tests randomly but not testing the right populations?
No tests, no positives.
UP has been doing 150k tests daily.
I just read about some of the minority groups in India for no reason, but was pleasantly surprised and disheartened also. The words against the Bhil Tribe, from face value, from a government agency is madness.
Calling Healthcare a state subject is laughable backtracking given how most were ready to laud dear leader for his 'early' lockdown masterstroke. You cant have your cake and eat it too. I live in Mumbai and the response on the ground effort has been as good as possible given the creaking infra built over 50 yrs and the population scale. On the other hand, dear leader is now happy to suddenly call it is a state subject and take pictures with peacocks. And no, I'm by no means saying Maharashtra Govt did well. Everyone fecked up but there will as per the IT cell only a few who are supposed to take blame.
Btw, comparing Maharashtra to UP is nonsensical. In fact, if anything the last 6 months has taught someone is never declare premature victory. This whole BJP vs non BJP states thing is so painfully clutching at straws, its unbelievable.
Btw, comparing Maharashtra to UP is nonsensical. In fact, if anything the last 6 months has taught someone is never declare premature victory. This whole BJP vs non BJP states thing is so painfully clutching at straws, its unbelievable.
Because these numbers are being managed by the district administration.
My uncle who works as a doctor in a medical college was diagnosed with covid yesterday. Instead of testing the entire family, they have passed on the medicines for treatment + home isolation and that’s it. Anecdotal, sure but I won’t take the UP numbers on face value.
Started going to office yet or still working from home?
Well, BJP and non-BJP states are polar opposites. You can utter the same statement about a non-BJP state and get 'Y' level security and get a sedition charge with the same statement in a BJP state.
The central government can only enforce a lockdown but India is a poor country and it can only go for so long.
What else do people expect? Dissolve state governments and enforce president's rule?
Mah is the worst affected region in the world over the past few weeks, there really is no region which has mismanaged as badly. Only Brazil and Peru were so bad.
What else do people expect? Dissolve state governments and enforce president's rule?
Mah is the worst affected region in the world over the past few weeks, there really is no region which has mismanaged as badly. Only Brazil and Peru were so bad.
Are death rates being fudged?
If you're planning of shutting the country down, do it in a planned manner and more importantly know what the objectives of the lockdown are and how you are going to achieve it.
In our case, they just hadn't planned for quite a lot of things - the migrant labour population being the biggest of all. We hadn't set up plans on how these guys would get food, and if social distancing would be possible then?
We were testing 8-12k people then, I believe, in the initial stages of the lockdown, when the purpose of the lockdown should have been to test all possible contacts of a confirmed case. And, they should have been testing the essential workers - including the deliverymen much more frequently. But our politicians were busy demonizing Tablighi Jamaat, and toppling MP govt and all.
In recent months, laying the foundation stone of Ram Mandir was on top of central govts.' agenda. Surely, the money can be spent in a better way. How about putting a halt to the PR exercises of our Supreme leader? Maybe, putting all the money set aside for Central Vista project to the healthcare budget?
Coming to the role of state govt., there have been few reports that they haven't been paid their GST dues. How is it remotely feasible for them to control the spread if you aren't paying them their dues!
It's easy to blame state govts. and they should be as well, as they should have done better in the initial stages, but to claim Central govt. has done even a remotely decent job is ridiculous.
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Can we just dismiss the Himachal CM and make her the CM already? I can't wait till 2022.
Anyone who has passed away outside of the hospital or before the test results isn’t considered as a Covid19 related death. On top of that, the OPD services of the college are still shut, so who knows how other patients are being dealt with currently.
Who cares about covid when the state government are more busy feuding with an actress and the media channels are.more interested in covering the death of an actor. Bollywood drama > Covid
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The morons running the country didn't want to feel left behind. So they gave an actress Y category security.
There is supposed to be a video of the non armed clash between Indian troops and Chinese troops. Initially it looks like that something that got out of control like in a football match. It seems that there was only a couple in a fight and others were trying to stop it and some more came and joined it and then it got out of control.
Bad form in demolishing her stuff. Should have slapped UAPA on her instead, what with her invoking Pakistan and all
That would’ve been fabulousBad form in demolishing her stuff. Should have slapped UAPA on her instead, what with her invoking Pakistan and all
Shiv Sena teaching some democracy to the BJP minionsBad form in demolishing her stuff. Should have slapped UAPA on her instead, what with her invoking Pakistan and all
The support for her on FB has been hilarious. Jhansi Rani and all. Udhav being called abusive names. The minions also want to give their usual abuse to Shiv Sena, but then they had to be really careful they were not abusing Bal Thackerey in any way. He was one of their own.Shiv Sena teaching some democracy to the BJP minions
UP is quite pathetic in its handling. No treatment even in case of emergency unless influence is used.
Data from most states apart from Kerala is fudged.
Kerala is the only place still following protocols and following up with people.
This is a crisis beyond the ability of Indian politicians, but this current government doesn't seem to have competence in anything worthwhile apart from getting people to vote for them through creating a culture of majoritarian victimhood.
Data from most states apart from Kerala is fudged.
Kerala is the only place still following protocols and following up with people.
This is a crisis beyond the ability of Indian politicians, but this current government doesn't seem to have competence in anything worthwhile apart from getting people to vote for them through creating a culture of majoritarian victimhood.
Apply for it lads
The feck kind of a tender is that
Its an opportunity bro! What we caf boys need to do is quickly set up a consultancy firm and then bid for the tender. I mean, its not like we have to bid a price or anything, we just need to bid with ideas and we all know us caftards have the biggliest ideas!The feck kind of a tender is that
We're looking at our future Dear Leader.
Apply for it lads