Debates were meant to illuminate. Today they are plunging us more into darkness. NDTV’s Ravish Kumar questions the media trial of JNU students under the guise of nationalism in a video that will give you gooseflesh.
The video starts with Ravish posing serious questions about the prime time debate based method of journalism. He then goes on to criticise the amount of ‘noise’ that live TV debates generate these days.
While he says this, the screen slowly dissolves to black as Ravish keeps on speaking from the ‘darkness’, a metaphor for where debates have gone today. Ravish explains how these ‘noisy’ debates do not allow everyone to answer equally, and often deviate from the actual questions.
Ravish also accuses anchors of inciting people and dividing them.
He further adds that everyone is entitled to have his own version of nationalism. Ravish also points out that the national emergency in 1975 was imposed under the pretense of nationalism.
Towards the end of the video, Ravish also lambasts the media for airing videos that showed Kanhaiya Kumar raising anti national slogans that many are saying, appear to be doctored. In doing so, he says, the media terribly mislabeled a student who comes from a poor background and was raising slogans to fight poverty, and turned him into a national enemy.
Social media hasn’t stopped talking about Ravish since the program aired.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)