India’s three biggest news stars – Barkha Dutt, Arnab Goswami and Rajdeep Sardesai – all from the NDTV stable, will be looking to ‘reinvent’ themselves this year. The three have been the only constant in the rapidly changing post-liberalisation satellite news television scene.
While Barkha Dutt has finally quit NDTV after 21 years and is yet to indicate her future plans, Arnab Goswami will be doubling up as media entrepreneur with investments in his soon to be launched ‘Republic’ – an across-the-media platform. Sardesai, meanwhile, did something unusual – he hosted a half-an-hour ‘special show’ to promote yesteryear Bollywood star Rishi Kapoor’s brand new book.
Last year, he hosted a quiz show, ‘News Wiz’ for India Today TV and admitted to me that he was looking to ‘reinvent’ Brand Rajdeep.
Sardesai has always seen himself as a hard core newsman and has steadfastly stayed clear of fluff like celebrity interviews.
This attempt at ‘reinvention’ is deeply rooted in the rapidly changing media ecosystem that is driven by a combination of political context, market and technology.
The Trio of Indian TV
Indian news television’s big three were incubated in Prannoy Roy’s NDTV that spoke to an aspirational post-liberalisation India, seeking global standards.
Anchors reported and reporters anchored. Barkha Dutt would not only do her ‘shows’ but also report on Kargil, Kashmir and Pakistan. Rajdeep broke stories regularly and the politicians jostled to get air time on his high octane hard news show, ‘The Big Fight.’ Much before Goswami became a perpetually outraged right-wing anchor, he had traveled all the way to Chennai, where he scooped an interview with Sonia Gandhi – he may just have been the first TV journalist to do so.
By the way, he was also NDTV’s ‘star’ Congress beat reporter. These stars were at ‘The Right Place at the Right Time’ – as Sardesai notes in his aptly titled chapter that he wrote for the ‘official’ NDTV commemorative volume ‘More News is Good News.’
The Rise of Arnab Goswami
But NDTV’s party ended with the economic boom of the mid-2000s along with the liberalisation of broadcasting regulations that brought in more media players. Those eyeing the English news and current affairs market looked towards poaching NDTV stars. Indira Kannan in her biography of TV 18 quotes promoter Raghav Bahl as saying, ‘I always had a huge fascination for their (NDTV) ability to handle scale, and scale with quality.’
Arnab Goswami was the first to leave and join the Bennett Coleman Group-owned channel, Times Now. Rajdeep followed suit in 2005, joining the TV 18 group as the Editor-in-Chief of CNN IBN, heralding Bahl’s arrival in the general news segment.
While Sardesai essentially carried forward the NDTV editorial template, Goswami broke away from it completely. He settled for the tabloid-esque, Fox News style – subjective and highly opinionated. He shouted, screamed and heckled studio guests. Politically, he was right-wing.
He ushered in the news culture of ‘breaking news.’ But he ended up damaging the institution of reporting. News was ‘broken’, not by intrepid reporters, but by Goswami himself, waving sheaves of paper in the studio and claiming it was ‘exclusive’ information.
As anger against the UPA mounted in the wake of the probity campaign, Goswami successfully tapped into it, only to emerge as the quintessential anti-establishment anchor. He is a highly successful one-man outrage factory. If Prannoy Roy symbolised the age of aspiration, Arnab Goswami’s TV persona was emblematic of the worldwide popular rage that had erupted, following the global meltdown.
Hit By Bad Times
The meltdown impacted Indian television’s largest media conglomerate – the TV 18 group. It changed hands, with Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance group taking control from promoter Raghav Bahl. The subsequent ‘firing’ of Rajdeep Sardesai sent shock waves across the industry. If he could lose his job, then who was safe? Sardesai’s current avatar as ‘Consulting Editor’ of the India Today TV Group is a huge professional comedown for arguably India’s best TV journalist. His role is confined only to his 9 PM prime time show.
Barkha Dutt, who was in the midst of a controversy over the Radia tapes, took a knock professionally. Brand NDTV also suffered a bit as it backed her at a time when debates about “probity” had become shrill.
A recent tweet by her suggests she may be back as TV anchor, even as she tries to reinvent herself as Washington Post columnist.
Current Media Landscape
In the last few years, two parallel trends can be discerned in the media space. One, the age of TV stars is over. The NDTV stable is finally depleted. Unlike earlier, TV anchors only anchor, while a reporter’s profile is no more than that of a bite collector.
Secondly, the bloodbath in the television and print industry post-meltdown and the emergence of a new political dispensation has triggered green shoots in the digital space.
Several print editors are now part of digital start-ups – Siddharth Vardarajan (The Wire), Shekhar Gupta (The Print) and Bharat Bhushan (Catch News). But they lack a sustainable revenue model. ‘The Wire’, for instance, is a ‘not-for-profit’ media venture and depends on ‘donations from readers and philanthropically-minded individuals.’
The Print appears to be relying on Gupta’s personal funds and is still limited to Facebook posts and generating low-cost programmes for NDTV, one year after it was launched.
The Quint that looks to target mobile content remains perhaps the only digital portal to have received investments from Bloomberg. The joint venture will ‘cover broadcast, digital and live events across India.’ As we speak, news consumers continue to gravitate towards digital portals run by mainstream media companies – print and television. That is because they have in-built cross-platform synergies to source news content.
The key issue therefore remains generating fresh content with a sustainable revenue model. News is a money guzzling beast. Therefore as we watch digital media taking shape – admittedly a long drawn out process – the big media story this year is neither Barkha Dutt nor Rajdeep Sardesai. It is the newsy Arnab Goswami. Will he pull off an encore with ‘Republic?
(The author is a television journalist for twenty years and is an independent media researcher. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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