NDTV's Wardrobe Malfunction

This had to happen! When the Supreme Court ordered the Zakia Jafri petition against Narendra Modi back to the lower courts in September 2011 it had struck a devastating blow to many media channels and their campaign of lies over Gujarat 2002. I wrote then that “The make-up and mask of Chachi 420 wasn’t meant to last forever”. For long it has been a known fact that NDTV is a crony media channel which exists to support and defend the Congress party no matter what. Several posts on this site, including “Tainted? Have a chat with Barkha” or “NDTV: Evolving the Gandhi” and many more chronicle NDTV’s unacceptable claim of “Independent and honest”. In the latter post I even wondered why NDTV has a Congress panellist at all in debates when the whole channel acts as a panellist for the party. NDTV had also made this claim of “independent and honest” in the case they filed against AC Nielson and the group for TRP ratings claiming a damage of over 1 Bn dollars.  

On March 1 it took a couple of seconds for the wardrobe malfunction and for NDTV to completely stand exposed as a Congress crony. I doubt Barkha Dutt or anyone at NDTV can anymore claim “error of judgement” for Radiagate or any other misdeed. This was a discussion moderated on NDTV Hindi by Nidhi Kulpati. She was the original media celeb when Zee TV burst on to the scene with their Hindi news channel. She later shifted to NDTV. On Nidhi’s panel were Vinod Sharma (Again, why do they need him?), Sambit Patra of BJP, KC Tyagi of JDU, journalists Abhay Kumar and Purnima Joshi. The BJP was having a national meeting in Delhi and the panel was discussing its internal affairs. Out of the blue there is a prompt in Hindi at 30.30 minutes in the video to the anchor or a panellist to “defend for the Congress party”. Well, NDTV were defending and campaigning for and defending the Congress all these years no matter what, so the prompt was surprising. It’s a wardrobe malfunction that bared more than just body parts. It bared the character of NDTV. A very observant Rohit Baranwal captured the moment and put it up on Youtube.

Listen to the video carefully from 55 seconds onward. I have specially increased the volume at that point so it’s not missed. The prompt in Hindi is “Congress ke taraf se defend kar dena”. Brilliant! Many observers of the channel have often been asking the question to BJP leaders why they even appear on this political mouthpiece. This is particularly so for their top leaders like Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj. A political preference by a channel is not a crime but to go to the extent of fixing debates, as debates have always been fixed on certain channels, is breaking journalistic ethics and character. Then again, NDTV is not the only one. We just have to wait for a wardrobe malfunction from a couple of more channels.