Anjana Om Kashyap had come under fire recently after a video came out in which Kashyap was shown heckling and questioning a doctor in Muzaffarpur, during his duty hours in the ICU in the background of an Encephalitis outbreak in Bihar which took the lives of more than a hundred children and panic struck the administration and hospitals as they tried to overcome the disaster and avert more deaths.
Now, she has come under fire once again over her TRP-hungry form of media coverage of the Sakshi Mishra case. The mainstream media has already covered the issue in a very prejudiced manner. Sakshi Mishra had married a Dalit man Ajitesh Kumar, due to which her father and BJP MLA Rajesh Mishra is quite aghast, as per media reports. Though Sakshi didn’t directly accuse her father, she held her family responsible for the death threats levied on her. In an interview given to Aaj Tak, she said, “When I spoke to Ajitesh, my brother Vicky got to know first about this. He asked me continuously about him. Slowly, he started abusing me, and then he crossed all limits by beating me. He used to beat me and I used to plead him by holding his feet. I and my husband feel threatened by my father and his friends, which is why we had to upload the post on social media in order to protect ourselves.” For the media, this was enough to begin the public trial. Setting up a media trial, they accused the entire family of threatening the girl against the marriage. To make matters worse, channels like Aaj Tak and India Today included Sakshi in their prime time in order to portray her father as the villain, and sites like Firstpost published completely one-sided articles. The media has been keen on holding a media trial and holding one side as guilty even without listening to that side.
Now, Anjana Om Kashyap who has come under fire for her over the board journalism in the past as well has again come under severe criticism for her reportage of the Sakshi Mishra case where she seems hell-bent on taking sides and vilifying the father even without knowing his side. She literally holds a media trial in her 39 minutes-long show where she constantly vilifies a particular side even without going to the crux of the matter. Journalists like her don’t understand the simple thing that law enforcement and legal disputes are something which has to be essentially decided by the Courts and not by the media outlets. Media channels should not think that they can interfere with the due process by taking sides and showcasing a particular party as guilty of an offence.
However, media outlets like Aaj Tak have clearly crossed the line in the Sakshi Mishra case. They have no business to act as magistrates or mediators. All they are supposed to do is cover a matter instead of launching personal attacks and making allegations in order to grab eyeballs. If this is what the grossly unprofessional journalists are crossing the line in case involving an MLA, one can only imagine the extent to which they can go when it comes to disputes involving ordinary citizens.
It seems that Anjana Om Kashyap has not learned her lessons after the Muzzafarpur incident. She continues to persist with her sensational and TRP-hungry form of journalism.