Barkha Dutt had been long associated with NDTV and we all heard little snide comments made by her against NDTV after she quit. But today, Barkha has, perhaps for the first time, openly penned her thoughts against the “fake liberals” of NDTV.
In a detailed Facebook post, Barkha has now lashed out at NDTV for regularly censoring stories cutting across party lines.
She starts off by expressing her ‘cynical amusement’ at the public debate surrounding around NDTV pulling the Jay Amit Shah story down without getting into the merits of the story. She observes, without naming Sreenivasan Jain, that his calling the retraction of this story an ‘aberration’ is a falsehood, since NDTV has regularly indulged in such censorship.
While calling them ‘fake liberals’, Barkha Dutt recalls how Mr. Nitin Gokhale’s interview with the outgoing Navy Chief was taken down by NDTV. Though, it must be noted here, that when Mr. Gokhale’s story was taken down, Barkha herself had maintained stoic silence.
She claims that she was disallowed from pursuing a story that was called the “Jayanti Tax controversy” and was “given hell” for her story on the Gandhi son-in-law, Robert Vadra. She says the only reason the Robert Vadra story wasn’t taken down is because the management felt it would draw too many eyeballs.
In her Facebook post, she also writes about her she had to face a hostile newsroom environment because of her protests and how her stand was seen as a ‘betrayal’.
The owners communicated to her that they didn’t want her sort of arguments in stories like that of Robert Vadra and failing to abide by this diktat, Barkha said she would rather resign than do news sans engagement.
She says that while NDTV and its patrons pretend to fight against the BJP in their Press Club speeches, they have approached BJP for help several times and that they wanted her off daily news so that NDTV’s arbitrary decisions wouldn’t be questioned.
Firing repeated salvos, she calls NDTV’s stand utterly fake and says she neither sees NDTV and its journalists as victims nor as crusaders. But, their hypocrisy has certainly proved them to be ‘fake liberals’.
