“He who lives by other people’s WhatsApp chats shall be judged by his own WhatsApp chats.”—old jungle saying *** For weeks, after the death of Sushant Singh Rajput, India’s TV news channels feasted on crumbs fed to them—leaked transcripts of WhatsApp conversations of stars and upstarts, hinting darkly at murder, extortion, drugs and sex, all in the run-up to the assembly elections due in…
Tag Archives: Arnab Goswami
In a sea of conformist editorials, ‘Hindustan Times’ takes the cake and the bakery on Arnab Goswami’s arrest
Newspaper editorials on Republic TV founder and editor Arnab Goswami‘s arrest for allegedly abetting the suicide of an unpaid studio designer all take the same line: that no matter what the facts of the case, the arrest of a pesky needler is wrong. *** Hindustan Times *** The Indian Express *** The Times of India…
Mr Justice Arnab Goswami, the dispenser of instant judgments at 9 pm, gets a taste of his own medicine in TRP scam in the morning papers
Arnab Goswami‘s Republic TV has only been named in a Bombay Police FIR for allegedly rigging TV meters for ratings, but looking at the headlines in newspapers, it would appear it has already been held guilty in the court of public opinion. A not-unfamiliar experience for the 9 pm judge, jury and executioner. *** ***
Even a mad ‘Fox News’ anchor like Tucker Carlson says Coronavirus didn’t happen because the Chinese ate bats. So why do Rahul Kanwal and Vineet Jain want them to eat ‘khichdi’ and ‘papdi chaat’?
Even in the best of times, Indians are never short of sanctimony and self-righteousness but there has been an oversupply of both since the outbreak of #Coronavirus. The virtues of ‘Namaste‘ as a form of greeting—folded hands as opposed to a physical hug or handshake—has been extolled ad nauseam, even briefly inspiring a BJP IT…
What is common to Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Nixon, Putin, Kim, Trump—and the 56 inches of Narendra Modi? The belief that the press is the enemy of the people.
For all his soaring oratory—and his 56″ inch chest—Narendra Modi will go down as the first prime minister in Indian history who did not hold a single press conference during his five years in office. Modi did meet individual TV journalists, like Arnab Goswami of Republic TV and Smita Prakash of ANI, and he did…
Arnab Goswami dares ‘Aaj Tak’ and ‘ABP’ and ‘Zee News’ and ‘India TV’ on eve of ‘Republic Bharat’ launch: why did you not break any of the big stories in the last few years?
Ahead of the launch of the Hindi news channel ‘Republic Bharat’, Arnab Goswami, the founder and editor-in-chief of Republic TV, dares existing Hindi channels. In this screengrab running on the channel, Goswami asks why English TV news channels have broken most of the big stories in the last few years. See a shorter version of the…
The ex-banker who gave a middle-finger salute to Arnab Goswami, tells NDTV’s Vikram Chandra to stop inviting jingoistic demagogues from the ghats of Varanasi
The role of India’s TV news channels in providing a platform to the lunatic fringe to spout their unhinged bilge, post-2014, is worthy of a serious academic study. Then again, media and studies can’t be uttered in the same sentence since 2014 either. Night after night, and sometimes during the day too, on panel discussion…
At ‘Republic’ summit, there were (at the very least) 9 known BJP faces; 0 from Congress. Any wonder Arnab Goswami wants other news channels to boycott the party that boycotts him?
Mint, the business newspaper owned by the Hindustan Times group, has a four-page supplement of the first Republic Summit, hosted by the TV channel, Republic. The guest list, as evident from the photographs, is revealing of the channel’s moorings and impulses. Narendra Modi, Arun Jaitley, Amit Shah, Nitin Gadkari, Piyush Goyal, Devendra Fadnavis, Sarbananda Sonowal, Anurag Thakur, Smriti Irani Farooq Abdullah, Praful Patel, Kamal…
Can the Indian media ask Modi tough questions?
Interviews of Narendra Modi are like city buses. There is not one for ages, and then two come along at the same time. The first with the journalist-academic and undisguised Modi shill, Madhu Kishwar, for India News and NewsX; and the other for the Mukesh Ambani-owned ETV Rajasthan. In the Indian Express, Shailaja Bajpai compares…
Operation Rajnikant: starring Samir & Vineet Jain
There are 12 media personalities in the Indian Express list of the most powerful Indians in 2014—“ie 100″—for 2014, but 10 of them are proprietors, only one is a journalist and the other is a former journalist. As usual, the most interesting part of the prospective list are the factoids accompanying the profiles. # 19,…
A Kannada paper breaks RG’s code of silence
Even before he sat down last month with Kalpesh Yagnik of Dainik Bhaskar and Arnab Goswami of Times Now for one-on-one interviews, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi had met Editors in Delhi off and on, more off than on. These meetings were long, relaxed, informal but strictly off the record. Smart phones and cameras had to…
Mani Shankar Aiyar launches into Arnab Goswami
After a fiasco of an interview with Times Now editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami, Mail Today reports that Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi will now go through “mock interview sessions” before further TV powwows to prevent further fiascos. “The duration of future interviews will be around 30 to 45 minutes instead of 90 minutes as on Times Now.…
Arnab Goswami has done a fab job: Vineet Jain
Times group managing director Vineet Jain has been named person of the year by the industry journal Impact, from the exchange4media group. In an accompanying interview, Jain junior answers a couple of key questions. Talking to Ken Auletta of The New Yorker [last year], you said, “We are not in the newspaper business, we are…
An Editor explains ‘Arnab Goswami’ to an NRI
*** For most TV news consumers, Arnab Goswami is both a name and a phenomenon. But there are still large parts of the world to be conquered by Times Now‘s bulldog of an inquisitor. B.V. Rao, editor of Governance Now, explains the name and the phenomenon to a childhood friend who lives in Canada. ***…
When Arnab Goswami was not his ‘usual self’
In the era of news at the speed of light, no “scoop” lasts more than the time it takes for an obese OB van to turn the corner. On Friday, September 20, the Indian Express lead story on the activities of former army chief, Gen V.K. Singh‘s “rogue” outfit technical support division (TSD) threatened do…
Indian Express, Shekhar Gupta & Gen V.K. Singh
For the second time in 18 months, the northern edition of Viveck Goenka‘s Indian Express (sold in the south as The National Standard) has been drawn into a blazing row between the Congress-led UPA government and the then (and now retired) chief of the Army staff, General V.K. Singh. *** In April 2012, the Express…
Arnab Goswami, India wants to know, do you…?
The interjections, the Apsara pencil in your face, the six windows on the screen… they are all there on online store Flipkart’s new TV campaign, based on Times Now‘s editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami. Also read: Arnab Goswami finally, finally, joins Twitter ‘Arnab Goswami is corrective to babalog media’ How a martyr’s wife changed Arnab Goswami‘s outlook
The 5 stereotypes of journalists in Bollywood
Much as the role of the hero and the heroine has morphed in the Hindi film industry, so has the depiction of the villain and the vamp—and, of course, the journalist. From a pure print person till well into the late 1980s, the journalist on film is now largely a TV person. From a poorly…
The nation’s moral compass before Mr Goswami
Priya Ramani, editor of Lounge, the Saturday section of the business paper, Mint: “For residents of south Mumbai, in a faraway time before Arvind Kejriwal and Arnab Goswami, the taxi driver was this somnolent constituency’s only link to national politicking. “In the short drive from Nariman Point to Malabar Hill, the Navbharat Times and Yashobhoomi…
When Madhuri Dixit’s ghagra is ‘breaking news’
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar in the Business Standard: “When Madhuri Dixit danced to the song “TV pe breaking news hai re mera ghagra,” I wanted to hide. Her sizzling dance number in a red-light area from the latest hit Yeh Jawaani hai Deewani roughly means, “My skirt is the breaking news on television.” “…Many Hindi films now…
IJR 