In defence of Arnab Goswami
Writing for DailyO, Neena Haridas produced a number of reasons for Arnab Goswami's popularity, and why in the latest case of the JNU face off, he may not have gleaned the public mood correctly.
Broadly, there are two parts to Haridas' argument. One, that Goswami belongs to an old-style, elite set-up but has understood what the new India wants and is more than willing to give them that. Two, he changed tack in the middle of his coverage of the JNU face off in line with the public feedback he received.
I take issue with both points.
Goswami may have been an Oxford product and an NDTV alum, but that means little since he only came into his own when he became editor-in-chief at Times Now. A number of respected journalists, Rajdeep Sardesai among them, left NDTV and started out on their own. All of them today work for different media houses. So there is no one monolithic NDTV template that Goswami and others subscribed to, and which Goswami has now reneged on.
Two, I have always struggled to understand this slick correlation between India's past and the glorious elites that commanded it. Surely, there is more to India, and has always been, than elites deciding how things ought to run here. To say that a new generation likes WrestleMania-type reportage and to thus paint them as less sophisticated than an earlier generation which grew up on BBC is to look at things highly selectively. It is equally possible that there was always a desire for greater debate and less somnolence in media coverage, but no one was keen to spot and fulfil that need. After all, Amartya Sen did not use the term "argumentative Indian" only for this generation.
Finally, let me address Times Now's reportage of the current JNU stand off. There are two elements to what happened at JNU. One was the original incident of February 9 when anti-India slogans were raised on campus under the stewardship of one Umar Khalid. The other is the arrest and subsequent manhandling inside court of Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the JNU Students' Union.
These are two separate issues, but the dominant media discourse has conflated them and presented them as one. Goswami and Rahul Shivshankar of NewsX chose not to do so. When the news of the JNU protests first arrived, they (rightly in my view) exposed the sheer hypocrisy of those raising the slogans. The arguments about the inappropriateness of asking for India's demise from the heart of India have been made elsewhere, so I am not going to repeat them.
Goswami's take on this matter was similar to his stand on a number of other issues such as Pakistan, terror and the regressive Left that refuses to call out the hypocrisy within its ranks. His ideological bent on most issues is neither left nor right but skews to what is logical. He supports gay and women's rights. When the Sabarimala controversy erupted, he unabashedly supported women's right to offer prayers inside the temple.
There are some other pet themes of his. VVIP privilege is one. Time and time again, he has taken VVIPs to task for believing that they are different from the common man and deserving of special treatment. From ministers treating IAS officers shabbily to passengers being inconvenienced by VIP movement, Goswami has picked cudgels on behalf of the common man repeatedly.
This has endeared him to viewers who have greedily lapped up his sermonising tone and stentorian presence. This has nothing to do with a generational divide. It's an outcome of a media person betting on what his viewers need and unapologetically giving them that. His Pakistan debates are such a hit because he is the only prime time anchor willing to call a spade a spade. Without mincing words, he and Maroof Raza, a strategic affairs expert, split apart the double-faced nature of that country's policy towards India.
Coming back to the JNU stand off, when lawyers beat up Kanhaiya inside the Patiala House Court room, Goswami (rightly again, in my view) condemned their actions. It takes a certain maturity to be able to separate the complex issues at play as he did, and this is what makes him such a hit with viewers. While he condemned the anti-India slogans, he also lambasted lawyers taking the law in their own hands. The difference was he chose to give equal coverage to both issues, which proves that he is anything but "curiously out of step with the public mood," as Haridas says.
Rather, it is an outcome of Goswami understanding the public mood perfectly, and responding with what he deemed editorially prudent. While TRPs matter, news is a qualitatively different business too, and it is to Gowami's credit that he did not throw the baby with the bathwater during coverage of the JNU standoff.
By choosing to take a principled stand, he brought much needed nuance to an issue which, as often happens in India, has become another Left-vs-Right blood sport.