There are certain things that no matter how much you try cannot go hand in hand. One such entity is NDTV and ethical journalism—both at the opposite ends of the spectrum, seemingly meeting nowhere. In a striking example of NDTV’s honest ground-reporting, a video has surfaced from the twitter handle of NDTV where a reporter can be heard giving directions to a ‘migrant worker’ crossing the river Yamuna to enter Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh from Haryana’s Kalanaur to stage his walk again so as to obtain a better footage.
https://twitter.com/ndtv/status/1261274581756637185?s=20
For the Khan Market gang and the Lutyens zone journalists that sit in NDTV’s office, romanticizing poverty is a hobby. The poverty-porn its journalists like Ravish Kumar to ex-employee turned vulture Rajdeep Sardesai peddle is an everyday affair.
And therefore it does not come as a surprise that instead of offering a helping hand, the reporter asked the worker to turn back, perhaps to get a better shot at his misery.
The netizens were quick to react and started tearing NDTV for its insensitivity and callousness.
Such an insensitive video. NDTV journo is asking the migrant to go back & walk towards him again.
This is precisely how they buttress up their fake narrative. They ’direct’ it instead of ’reporting’ it. Such a shame!
— Vasudha (@WordsSlay) May 15, 2020
Well done NDTV that ur reporter asked the person walking to go back into the water and once again walk so that u get a better video to post !!! Long live Pidi journalism
— Aravindha (Modi Ka Parivar) (@Aravindhapk) May 15, 2020
Media on Migration… pic.twitter.com/ZQs5iqWefA
— Jagdish (@jbchem) May 15, 2020
NDTV did come up with a clarification, but we leave it to the reader’s discretion if they want to accept this meek attempt by NDTV to hide its face.
Clarification: This video was sourced from a stringer.
— NDTV (@ndtv) May 15, 2020
Languishing at the bottom of TRP ratings is one of the reasons why NDTV has been resorting to such nocuous behavior. According to Broadcast Research Council India (BARC) ratings, NDTV does not fare in the top-5 bracket of ratings—neither in the Hindi news channel category nor in the English news channel category.
Meanwhile, this is not NDTV’s first brush with staging incidents to stroke sensationalism. Over the years NDTV has been infamous for its prejudicial coverage and manipulative news coverage.
In February, the channel aired a graph of MPs with criminal charges belonging to five political parties- BJP, Congress, DMK, TMC, and JDU. The BJP had the least percentage of tainted MPs with 39 percent, yet the BJP’s bar graph was towering than those of other parties.
Its prime time reporter and Gauri Lankesh award winner Ravish Kumar has already given a clean chit to China and claimed that the Tablighi’s are innocent in the entire coronavirus episode.
A few months back, he had dubbed one gun-wielding Shahrukh as Anurag Mishra during the North-east riots thereby bringing chaos to Mishra’s life who was threatened with death threats.
The list is endless where NDTV has broken all the ethical guidelines of journalism. The best way to show the channel its place is by ignoring it, as the people have been doing and the ratings are proving.
After all, there’s a certain limit to which the left ecosystem can pump in its money into the failing enterprise that is NDTV.