Arnab Goswami making Republic TV "more about himself than the news", asserts top right-wing editor

Calling one of India's most controversial TV journalists Arnab Goswami "prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner of the evil forces conspiring against India", yet another right-wing "icon" in journalism, R Jagannathan, editorial director, Swarajya, has accused the former Times Now anchor of "making" his channel, Republic TV, "more about himself than the news."
According to Jagannathan, "By making himself bigger than the channel he owns, Goswami runs the risk of making himself the news, with the channel having nothing more than him as the asset. This is dangerous. A channel dependent on one person is vulnerable."
Jagannathan's "accusation" comes amidst Goswami, founder of the right-wing Republic TV, refusing to apologize for claiming that the car in which he sat during the 2002 Gujarat riots was attacked by a communal mob barely 50 metres off the chief minister's residence, a claim his ex-boss Rajdeep Sardesai has strongly refuted.
According to Jagannathan, "The problem for Goswami is that, unlike other journos who may be wrong-footed by such gaffes, he cannot just acknowledge a mistake and move on", adding, the result has been, Goswami is being seen as “plagiarising” Sardesai’s experience, "which gave the channel (India Today TV), which hosts Sardesai, the opportunity to take potshots at him in the name of media ethics."
Pointing out that "Republic TV continues down the same path that (Goswami) trod at Times Now", owned by the Times of India group, Jagannathan says, it means that "there is little differentiation from the old Arnab Goswami". However, what Goswami forgets in the process is, he "is up against a strategist like Samir Jain and the marketing machine at Times Group", which has "more resources than the Republic."
This has made Times Now attack Goswami "from two ends", says Jagannathan. "While Times Now continues as before under Rahul Shivshankar, Navika Kumar and Anand Narasimhan, at the other end the group has launched other TV brands like Mirror Now to corner him."
Also criticizing Goswami for continuing with his Times Now ways, where one found him screaming at participants, Jagannathan insists, "It is one thing to be edgy and politically incorrect, quite another to make the screen the scene of multiple screams where no one can be heard, and nothing is registered as good or bad argument. At some point, his audiences may just tire of this. You can’t be Times Now Squared to win this game. You must be different."
Insisting that there is a need to know why is "Goswami not able to acknowledge a mistake and just move on like the others did, including Fareed Zakaria of CNN, who has been repeatedly accused of plagiarism, but the channel continues to stand by him", Jagannathan says, this is because, "unlike other anchors, who merely have viewers and audiences, Goswami has a fan following."
"When you have large, uncritical fan clubs, you face the same problem that a Modi has with his uncritical bhakts, or Bollywood’s heroes have with diehard worshippers: you have to live up to their image of you. Modi is 'chhappan inch ki chhati', and so he cannot do anything non-macho for fear of his fans", says Jagannathan.
"A filmstar who bashes 100 villains on the screen cannot be shown as someone who is afraid of dogs or can’t actually mount a horse. A Goswami is always right, and mistakes acknowledged by him will not go down well with his fan-base... He cannot be seen making an abject apology," believes Jagannathan.
---
Click HERE to watch what Goswami said, courtesy AltNews.in

Comments

Ahmedabad's civic chaos: Drainage woes, waterlogging, and the illusion of Olympic dreams

In response to my blog on overflowing gutter lines at several spots in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur, a heavily populated area, a close acquaintance informed me that it's not just the middle-class housing societies that are affected by the nuisance. Preeti Das, who lives in a posh locality in what is fashionably called the SoBo area, tells me, "Things are worse in our society, Applewood."

RP Gupta a scapegoat to help Govt of India manage fallout of Adani case in US court?

RP Gupta, a retired 1987-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has found himself at the center of a growing controversy. During my tenure as the Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar (1997–2012), I often interacted with him. He struck me as a straightforward officer, though I never quite understood why he was never appointed to what are supposed to be top-tier departments like industries, energy and petrochemicals, finance, or revenue.

PharmEasy: The only online medical store which revises prices upwards after confirming the order

For senior citizens — especially those without a family support system — ordering medicines online can be a great relief. Shruti and I have been doing this for the last couple of years, and with considerable success. We upload a prescription, receive a verification call from a doctor, and within two or three days, the medicines are delivered to our doorstep.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

Environmental report raises alarm: Sabarmati one of four rivers with nonylphenol contamination

A new report by Toxics Link , an Indian environmental research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund , a global non-profit headquartered in New York, has raised the alarm that Sabarmati is one of five rivers across India found to contain unacceptable levels of nonylphenol (NP), a chemical linked to "exposure to carcinogenic outcomes, including prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women."

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.

Tracking a lost link: Soviet-era legacy of Gujarati translator Atul Sawani

The other day, I received a message from a well-known activist, Raju Dipti, who runs an NGO called Jeevan Teerth in Koba village, near Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar. He was seeking the contact information of Atul Sawani, a translator of Russian books—mainly political and economic—into Gujarati for Progress Publishers during the Soviet era. He wanted to collect and hand over scanned soft copies, or if possible, hard copies, of Soviet books translated into Gujarati to Arvind Gupta, who currently lives in Pune and is undertaking the herculean task of collecting and making public soft copies of Soviet books that are no longer available in the market, both in English and Indian languages.

Boeing 787 under scrutiny again after Ahmedabad crash: Whistleblower warnings resurface

A heart-wrenching tragedy has taken place in Ahmedabad. As widely reported, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane crashed shortly after taking off from the city’s airport, currently operated by India’s top tycoon, Gautam Adani. The aircraft was carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members. As expected, the crash has led to an outpouring of grief across the country. At the same time, there have been demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Venkaiah Naidu. The most striking comment came from BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, who stated : "When a train derailed in the 1950s, Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned. On the same morality, I demand PM Modi, HM Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Naidu resign so that a free and fair inquiry can be held. All that Modi and his associates have been doing so far is gallivanting, which must stop." Amidst widespread mourning, some fringe elements sought to communalize the tragedy. One post ...

Revisiting Gijubhai: Pioneer of child-centric education and the caste debate

It was Krishna Kumar, the well-known educationist, who I believe first introduced me to the name — Gijubhai Badheka (1885–1939). Hailing from Bhavnagar, known as the cultural capital of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Gijubhai, Kumar told me during my student days, made significant contributions to the field of pedagogy — something that hasn't received much attention from India's education mandarins. At that time, Kumar was my tutorial teacher at Kirorimal College, Delhi University.

Search This Blog