Ravish Kumar, senior executive editor at NDTV India and a prime time anchor, in a Facebook post shared the screenshots of first pages of Hindi newspapers and asked questions regarding why all the newspapers did not give priority to CBI officer Manish Kumar Sinha’s petition in Supreme Court of India.
Sinha had alleged that National Security Advisor (NSA), Ajit Doval interfered in CBI’s investigation against special director Rakesh Asthana. In recent times, Ravish Kumar has become more of a media activist rather than a media person. He refers all the news channels and newspapers differing from him as ‘Godi Media’. To put himself on a moral high ground, he criticizes other mainstream media organizations and writes against them.
As one of his colleagues in the NDTV, Akhilesh Sharma, rightly pointed out,Ravish Kumar wants to be a moral police to the media organizations and want to paint all channels and newspapers with the same brush. In his opinion, all the media organizations should represent the ideology of his own. The mud-slinging by him on other media organization is to undermine their credibility and heighten his reputation. Every media organization is independent and had an editorial policy of its own. The priority of news depends on editorial policy of the media organization. But the problem with Ravish Kumar is that he wants the same policy for every organization like a Communist regime.
The so-called tolerant new anchors who claim that intolerance is growing in the country could not digest the fact some media organizations have editorial policy different from their own. These news anchors are self-proclaimed liberals but they are not left with an iota of liberalism when some person or organization does not follow a policy which according to them is better. The media organizations prioritize the news depending on different criteria. The criteria of news priority includes education level of the reader, the region where the newspaper is being published, the interest of the readers, the ideological positions of the readers, business interests of the newspaper and many more factors. So, if we are living in a country where media is state controlled then the editorial policy of every media organization will be same. Ravish Kumar perhaps secretly supports state controlled media because he belongs to the old school of Indian journalism of 1990s when there was absolute state control over media. The Congress party nourished many anchors to support its policies in the days of state monopoly over media, the state monopoly over media ended in the last few decades but the subservience of old-school journalists to Congress party remains the same.
अब कुछ पत्रकारों पर ज़िम्मेदारी बढ़ गई है।उन्हें न सिर्फ़ अपना काम करना होता है, बल्कि यह भी देखना होता है कि दूसरे पत्रकार सही काम कर रहे हैं या नहीं। मसलन ख़बर छपी कि नहीं, छपी तो कहाँ छपी, कितने कॉलम में छपी,पहले पन्ने पर छपी तो लीड क्यों नहीं छपी? ठीक हेडलाइन क्यों नहीं लगी?
— Akhilesh Sharma (@akhileshsharma1) November 20, 2018
Akhilesh Sharma, political editor and anchor of NDTV India took a shot on the post of Ravish Kumar and tweeted that ‘some journalists have become watchdog of other journalists and media organization rather than doing their own job’. It seems that many people in NDTV itself are fed up with Ravish Kumar’s pursuit of moral high ground in comparison to other anchors and media organizations. The journalists and viewers are fed up with Ravish Kumar’s opposition to Modi government for opposition’s sake. The dissenting voices in Ravish Kumar’s own organization, like Akhilesh Sharma, have started coming out as people could no longer take the hypocrisy of Ravish Kumar. Ravish must take the advice of Akhilesh Sharma and should start focusing on his own work rather than sermonizing other people. Of course, one can only hope that Ravish’s focus would not yield into more petulant youtubers becoming defence and policy analysts on prime time television or worse, prime time shows becoming a literal clown show.