 1, 2, 3, starting. So this is going to be a slightly different episode, a bit of a personal episode today. We're going to be talking about NDTV which is now more or less come under control of Gautam Adhani's company, his media company because Pranay and Radhika Roy who started NDTV have exited the main owner entity, the holding company, RRPR holdings. They've exited it and they've come out of the board and NDTV's big star, Ravish Kumar has quit the company. He will no longer be seen on NDTV India, NDTV's Hindi channel at 9 p.m. when he would start that show and millions of people would actually tune in. He's now as of this morning announced that he's going to be much more active on his YouTube channel and to actually chat about it, not really talk much, not talk about lofty things. I have with me Trina. Trina denies that she's a reporter but I know she's gone and reported several times. I think you went to Maharashtra Dina during the farmers protest. And Trina informed me today that she's now 30 and I was under the impression she's 20 which you tend to, you know, you see younger people when you're my age at 50 and you think everyone's 20. But Trina you wouldn't have seen NDTV. You would have been too young when NDTV used to, NDTV really became a household name which was with a show called The World This Week. When people knew about Pranay Roy, he used to come as a sephologist, used to anchor the election shows on Durdarshan. He did that in, I think from 1980 onwards he did it. But The World This Week was a turning point. Good evening. It brought international production quality to a current affairs program on Indian television and if you walked out on Friday evenings in the late 80s, early 90s, around, I don't actually remember what time it came, I think 9.30pm it used to come and you would hear the title track of World This Week and you know everyone's watching it. It was almost like what you did, again you would not have an idea if you went out on Sunday mornings in the 80s when there was Ramayana. You could actually hear that all around you as well if you went, every household which had a TV had it on and similarly World This Week was like that and that kind of defined NDTV. But I want to know, you were, you know, you probably started watching TV news sometime in the mid 2000s I would assume or early 2000s at best. I mean I probably watched it earlier but didn't make my sense of it. Yeah, it was on in the house probably, right? Yeah, exactly. So what were, when you think about NDTV, now you're a journalist, a profession you always wanted to join the yeah. Now, to be honest, neither did I think I'd ever be a journalist as I was kind of, it was a job I suddenly got, I went and did it. But when you thought, think of NDTV, what do you think? You're a young person. What image do you have? I think one thing that's always been true, I mean especially in recent years with all other news channels turning sort of into like a drama show, people screaming and all of that, it's people I think especially of my generation have turned to NDTV as something that's reliable, like in terms of non-digital media, TV media, it has always been a place which is reliable, somewhere where you hear and especially Ravish like you said is someone people always turn to to get real news. But these would largely be liberals like you, right? Left liberals, people like that. Because a large number of people who are young people who are not in that space, either don't watch news at all. But I think for example for Ravish, it would not just be limited to liberals. Do you think that there's a wider view? I think there is a wider view. Even the hatred that he gets from the right wing quite often. But you, is this in the post Modi period that you started watching NDTV or did you know about NDTV before that? I mean you were pretty young. I mean I did but the thing is that I also grew up in a house where everyone was a journalist. Okay. So I don't know if I can take that as a benchmark. Well that's a good enough thing that I think our viewers would be interested in knowing what it's like to be in a journalist. I didn't grow up in a journalistic household. So for me for example especially even now when on election days like you said like election result days it's always like I wake up to the sound of NDTV. Like you wake up and the TV is on constantly and you're seeing counting going on and all of that. So I actually did watch it from like a younger age but like I said I probably didn't make much sense of it. Yeah but it was there. It was there. It's always been there. And even now like even here in NewsClick when we do election counting days when we do shows when we have to take feed from like whenever we had to I mean obviously we use the election commission website but whenever we have to use feed from any channel it was always NDTV. Yeah it's not running trying to get viewers by falsely giving data before it's even arrived which some channels tend to do. Alright so that's an interesting thing but before you know before 2014 there was a certain space right and after that the spaces changed because I would say from 2013 onwards there was a very strong rise of the right wing in television news and 2014 is a turning point in that sense that NDTV is the only one which continued to be more or less on the path that it did. There were of course there were certain kinds of you know I wouldn't say compromises but one had to be much more careful and I headed NDTV in there from 2014 to 2018 and during the Modi years and I started in 2008 and there was a clear difference in the atmosphere and I think that is what has come to a point of culmination today where we knew things are moving to a space where if you spoke up against the government or you were going to face something you it wasn't as if the government said oh we don't like you yeah it's like there will be something that will happen to you whether that happens or not is not necessarily true it's just the fear right what people call the chilling effect you know it's just that the fear that this exists but I just want to quickly go back for our viewers are you at all aware of how private television emerged in India? No not at all. Okay so this is interesting thing to look at you know because there were private entertainment production houses which were producing serials for Durdarshan but when it came to news I think it was only 1995 that a private news channel or was it 96 I might be not entirely sure either Narasimha Rao government or the United Front government which came in and they gave contracts to NDTV and to India today right to produce news bulletins before that right I you might have seen it in movies do you know I don't know if you've seen this movie called what is called with you know Abhay Devol, Rithik Roshan and Zindagi Namalik. In that there's a place where Rithik Roshan they talk about the Durdarshan thing. Have you ever heard the Durdarshan thing? Yeah I have. So that is how it was and there was a news reader came and with a very stentorian voice would I think it was great stars at that time right Tejeshwari Singh he unfortunately passed away there were people like Gitanjali, Ahir and many others right but the way in which they read the news was very formal so it would be like this is the news read by right and there were set pieces and usually the news was about the prime minister has gone to Tehran and done this and then you would see those clips or this thing has been inaugurated and they would be saw a little bit of international news hardly any pictures most of it was read out right and earlier there was no what today everyone knows about auto queue or teleprompter because it's on every phone and everyone's making TikTok and stuff not TikTok anymore sadly I was a TikTok addict and maybe it's good but Instagram videos are being made very teleprompter. Durdarshan actually for a long time didn't have a teleprompter so people looked up and sometimes just read it straight out of cue cards right and what was done was that private television producers in DTV was one of them and India today maybe it was already TV today I don't know because they produced a video shows have you ever seen a VHS tape I have you have yeah all right so some of our viewers would have and some might not have yet to those are the old days of a VCR in which you put in a tape and you watch movies very bad quality and actually Hindustan Times and India today produced these VHS tape news shows like current affairs and news shows once a week and you subscribe to it and the tape came home and you put it into a VHS and you watched it and the show they produced was called News Track it used to be done by Madhu Trehan so they had that kind of background there and and many I think a few people in NDTV like Vikram Chandra used to work in News Track for a while we had a great camera person called Ajmal Jami who came from News Track so News Track had some television experience NDTV had television experience based on what it was doing as the world this week which was not Indian news at all it is always clips of international news so there would be international politics there would be sport science right music art and stuff like that and a new news bulletin was being produced I think it was called the news tonight and it was very different from anything that we had seen right and today everyone knows about what a P2C is or a piece to camera right where the reporter looks into the camera and says something from the field that is completely new for Indian viewers they've never seen anything like this no right so Ajtaq was the name coined for the Hindi news bulletin which would come at I think 9 30 and 9 o'clock was or maybe it's 9 30 and 10 I don't exactly remember right and Pranar Roy would anchor the English news which was being produced by NDTV for Duddarshan and TV today would produce what they call Ajtaq right from which the channel Ajtaq was launched in 2000 right but earlier it was just a show and it used to be anchored by a very legendary Hindi journalist called SP Singh who again I think died on the job he was very he died of some sort of a hemorrhage and a stroke he became and it produced very good Hindi television journalists the difference which one Ajtaq senior journalist told me later on was that we called ourselves the tiktok is not tiktok the Mickey Mouse studio right they considered NDTV to have great production values and Ajtaq had lower lesser production values but in some ways it was more nimble right it was less formal NDTV still followed the old in fact had a very BBC influence for a very long time and you must have watched BBC bulletins which continued to be in today's world pretty boring they're trying to change but I think they have a very set style which they follow and NDTV was kind of modeled on that in fact and they also had that really formal way of announcing the news I mean not now but earlier yeah absolutely because I watched a few clips of like for example on about the monarchy and stuff and there's always this like the queen has like the way of reading yeah it's a very similar yeah I think so BBC I think NDTV was trying to make a slight change because I know that Dr. Roy himself Dr. Roy was influenced by some of the very great American anchors Dan Rather for instance and I think Walter Conkwright who was a very famous news anchor and what NDTV did was it changed the language of TV news completely right the day I joined NDTV which was in 1999 how old were you seven seven but I joined and sometime in February so you might not have been seven I was seven okay so the day I joined you know after a couple of days I was given the task of writing a small script it was a in those days there were these make 21s which used to crash all the time and there's a movie about it also so in those days they would crash and so I had to write that the black box and the black box had to be found and you know so I wrote something that the black box has been recovered right and Dr. Roy used to come to the newsroom at about six o'clock for his nine o'clock show and write all everything right he would rewrite all the scripts and stuff like Dr. Roy and Ms. Roy would sit and rewrite scripts and they would not the content but the style and also he would ask hundred questions before clearing a story and he would write what we call anchor links which is what links one story to the next right and in those days all stories were packaged they were individual things which went on a tape and you put in a tape you played it there were these four tape players and you put one in then that when it ended the anchor looked at the camera read out the link and then the next tape was rolled right I have a good story about that I'll tell you at some point now so Dr. Roy would say that who has written this and I said I have so he said I'd written the black box has been recovered so he said never recover anything yeah just find it so that stayed with me that television actually is a space where we have to de-formalize remove formality and make it everyday language and I learned how to write scripts and how to basically speak in the way in which we normally speak which is not the way we write yeah because when we write we usually complete sentences yeah we always do yeah but when you speak like we are doing right now yeah we are speaking in clauses yeah and this is something that I learned at NDTV and the good script writers who wrote very well Barkha Srinivasan Jan they were good writers they all wrote in clauses and Dr. Roy was really outstanding when it came to writing his scripts and he even wrote down his sides his quips and put it in brackets which when he read out would look like he's cracking something which is not written there but he would actually write and produce and so there was a bar which was set at which was very high that is the stylistic part and it changed news TV in India yeah in 1990 I think then there was a bit of a problem with either 98 probably and there was a problem with the government switching off NDTV things and they moved to star star gave the slot to this is Rupert Murdoch to NDTV to do the same news so this was the first time that a private channel was being allowed to put news on right no longer on a government platform right but even star was under certain conditions that the nine o'clock bulletin all scripts had to be cleared by star had a set of people who all came from Durdarshan and they were very they had good points they were never and there were certain rules that it can't push anything which is superstitious unscientific and stuff like that right and in fact it was such that there was a I'm jumping the gun so later on in 98 a full-fledged channel was launched which is star news which was owned by Rupert Murdoch the content was provided by NDTV and I joined NDTV the next year a few months later actually and we used to work for star news and the you know in the one year every April Fool's day there would be some fake story on the bulletin the last story would basically be something fake and one of the stories was every day so the show was about the story that the first male pregnancy right and there was one producer called Gunjan who you know there he was made to lie down in one of the clinics and while the doctor very famous gynecologist was convinced to do it and I think Barkha was the reporter and Gunjan was saying yes the first thing I noticed is that my beard fell off and the star you know the checker said this is a very good story this has happened he said oh this is fantastic science is really but luckily he didn't say oh this is totally unscientific we can't show it but the checks were actually good they were not but what I'm saying is soon what happened is that that news TV moved far beyond where it used to be NDTV was essentially an English news channel which catered to a very small space right influential space but a very small space and maybe people who were had no other option they still watched NDTV right so it's NDTV was essentially English news and every half back half hour was English news which was being translated into Hindi there were very few reporters who were mainly Hindi news reporters and that too they were there because they were good at it not because they were taken for the Hindi bulletin they reported for the English channel right but often their stories were being written in English but it was being translated and one of the translators was Ravish right he was on the translation desk and I think in his latest video he said that he started of you know his job was to look at letters sent by viewers and choose a few letters which would be read out in the morning show and so the space actually changed gradually as it expanded and there are interesting things here because when you have watched have you watched any Hindi news channel not apart from only Ravish no but you would have an idea as to what is shown on there or no yeah like the sanshani types and those are seen India TV so there was a it was actually a revolutionary change brought in in 2003 by Star News which was now star star called ABP news because NDTV broke away from Murdoch and launched its own channels NDTV 24-7 and NDTV India English and Hindi and Murdoch then launched a separate channel which was Star News right and Star News did this great revolution it came up with two shows which are blockbuster rating which had blockbuster rating nothing else worked on Star News no one watched it those two shows of fan did extremely well and in some ways they changed the nature of news TV completely in India and one as you said sanshani right basically I don't do you have any idea about something called Manohar I think the other day we were discussing about true crime yeah right yeah you're saying why has true crime become so why are people so interested in true crime and I since we were thinking of doing that show I started doing some research and I went to this academic side J store to download and I saw that there were some papers from 1976 that why have people become so interested in true crime okay and sanshani was partly a true crime show so what it did was that it took these crime stories and completely converted them into almost cinematic experience with the reenactment and all that and it had massive viewership it had huge viewership and and it also had something called saas bahu or saasish I remember that saas bahu was again a great innovation yeah I don't think either of these have space in a news channel but nevertheless these are great innovations because the system allowed them to come in yeah this was essentially it started off as being a summary of the previous days soaps yeah so saas bhi kabhi bahu thi yeah what happened yesterday so if you missed it you could watch saas bahu or saasish and then it became so popular that they set up a full team they would go to what they called OTS on the set right they would go and interview these people this was in hindi news and I kid you not in 2008-9 this was the highest watched hindi news show across the day wow not 9 p.m 10 p.m no 2 p.m saas bahu or saasish right not for abp news or star news for every channel yeah and you could see that normally what happens people watch news early in the morning leave home right so you see that bump right and then what happens is that viewership drops completely if you look at english news there's a bump at the beginning of the day and then it drops completely prime time and then it rises from about 7 30 onwards and then drops again at 11 30 so you have these two slots four hours year two hours yeah hindi news is different it goes up and again in the morning there's a certain thing which again ndtv never did yeah then it drops goes up at two o'clock two to three right has been extended to 230 and I'm talking about things from about four years ago so I don't know what how it's changed and then it would pick up again like a normal thing this particular afternoon slot was filled by channels with saas bahu or saasish then came things like dharma right which would and there were also shows where they told you that today you shouldn't eat pumpkin if you're of some yeah you know I don't know if you're Sagittarius then this is not a good day to eat pumpkin you should stick to karela and then people watch these shows right but there's no space in news yeah but you see no one was actually watch okay alarm yeah alarm it's a silent alarm I think the so as I was saying that you know the thing is that when one I think we should keep this in the show why not yeah we'll keep it in the show we are keeping this in the show all right so the the point is that this changed the nature of television right news television people realize that to get ratings you have to do these things crime cinema cricket and cosmology we have not cosmology in the sense of astrology in fact astrology became a big chunk of morning shows all right and now when you look at ratings as such it looked like that these channels have huge viewership what's happening right they've captured the viewership but they've captured the viewership by basically diluting news yeah once that happens what happens to prime time obviously you attempted to do the same thing in prime time right yeah exactly so channels went to that as well so this was a dilution process which essentially weakened NDTV because NDTV didn't follow that route at all yeah and this weakening actually over a period of time along with the rigging of you know viewership rigging by ratings rigging yeah basically made it difficult for NDTV to sustain itself and I'm talking about a period after the general financial crisis global financial crisis of 2008-09 when you know valuations of companies well it became difficult to sustain itself from advertising right so it started making losses and when you make losses what happens you're and either succumb and do what others are doing or you say no we are going to stick to what journalism is and should be but we don't have money so we can't send journalists out yeah we can't hire more people and if someone leaves you're not gonna stop them right and at some point we'll have to probably let people go because otherwise we can't pay the salaries yeah so today what we're seeing and I think this is a process which started long ago is the process where news TV seeded space to entertainment yeah and this is not unique to India this is true for the US of course across right and seeded space to entertainment and then gradually stopped journalism out together okay and news click sends you out to the field right yeah it's not an easy thing I'm sure it was tough being there you know I mean I stopped being a reporter because I didn't want to go out in the heat yeah and so it's not easy it's a tough job NDTV really pampered its reporters for a very long time right and we used to be put up in great hotels wherever we went where we would go to sleep and come back yeah NDTV reporters and camera crew used to be given you know food would be sent to them every evening snacks would go out and people from other channels would say what is happening yeah as a part of the cost-cutting exercise I was among those who said that we should stop this and the Roy said no this is one of the things NDTV does give food to you know reporters and crew right we can't stop it whatever it costs so there are these certain things which NDTV continued to do in the good practices of an organization which made it financially weaker right the average salary in NDTV was much higher than any other place but the top salaries were lower which means that it was giving many more people right better salaries the ratio of the lowest to the highest which is not the case anywhere right the ratio of the lowest to the highest salary was much lower the highest to the lowest salary was much lower yeah in NDTV than any other place right so median salaries were higher in NDTV than any other place and NDTV carried that legacy which meant that its salary bill was very high yeah and once the global financial crisis happened you could no longer leverage your stocks to raise funds right so that's the process of weakening that started never for NDTV which ultimately is resulting in this that the Roy's had to pledge a part of their shares to take a loan and that those shares are now by default being taken over by Adani's media arm and therefore whether they like it or not whether they want it or not it's gone yeah this is one part of it but you know the other part of it is the nature of television news itself right and even here NDTV's tried to stick to that path for a very long time but couldn't as I said because of shortage of money because of shortage of viewership NDTV had tried to revive the 9 o'clock news bulletin several times but it gets no viewership right what happens is that people now come home and they say I'm too tired and you know there's a Bengali word called adha adha means you sit and chat like you're doing right now and you have your cup of tea or something stronger when you basically talk about things which you know nothing about but with a lot of authority right so that is what I think most viewers want to do when they come home at 9 o'clock they want that adha or they want ammunition for the adha and if you don't provide that then they're not going to watch you they want a vicarious sense of being in a very heated debate by watching that right and Fox News in the US pioneered that right Arnab Goswami copied it and others followed suit right but that is what it has become and you know one of the things about liberals is like you're sitting here and thinking what the hell are you talking about we tend to question all the time right we are much more on liberals or left-wing people are more likely to be skeptical of things and those on the right wing because the nature of right wing identity is to follow someone who's an authority right you accept loyalty right respect these are part of the which is not really there in left most of the time one would think that what does that guy know I know better that is our attitude right and that makes it much easier for this kind of you know top-down discourse to be controlled by the right rather than the left yeah because if you sit and watch an anchor who's a liberal and say oh he's pretty good but he really didn't say this wasn't right yeah that is our tendency there is a right-wing viewer tends to tends to follow accept and and that's what got Arnab Goswami is following and then the Zee chap who has moved to ask that I forget his name the same kind of even I'm forgetting it right now Sudeep Chaudhry yeah the following that he had right he has I think he was the most watched you know anchor at nine o'clock at one point and you can get away by saying anything yeah no one's questioning you especially when you are back in worship also yeah massive you see that with ravish also I think it exists much more in in the what one couldn't call the vernacular space yeah at least in the Hindi world I can't speak about I do see that kind of hero worshipping that one yeah that's definitely right it's there it does not that's kind of thing does not exist in English because again those who are English speaking or their second language is English their mother tongue what they're speaking about in public space where they speak English like you and me and my first language is Bengali but my second language would be English before Hindi although the 10 years I spent in entity India made my Hindi much better much better but you know when I used to come and record here I've forgotten his name there was a camera person here who would always correct my Hindi I think sir he would always say it kind of mistakes that Bengalis always do but what happens is that again in this English space we are less likely to hero worship because we consider ourselves to be hero we consider ourselves to be empowered right yeah those are disempowered disenfranchised which is much more in Indian vernacular languages although English is also an Indian language right they tend to follow again I'm speaking more about the Hindi bet I don't know how far that is true for other places as well and this kind of stardom actually increased much more in Hindi than in English and I think the only comparable person in English would be Anubhav Swamy in that sense right and he did very well in Hindi as far as I can I haven't watched him but apparently Hindi republic used to anchor as well and got a lot of a lot of viewership there so this is a change where journalists moved from the field to the studio right because the studio got your ratings yeah right the people were willing to sponsor studio-based shows and you had to get that money because costs were very high yeah right and they weren't willing to sponsor news shows right there was no brand identity they got from a news show yeah but if let's say Anubhav Sudhir Chaudhary or Ravish came on a show and before that there was a sponsor's logo which ran then there's a identification that is so that is what pushed journalism out of the farmers protest from there into the studio right chat became the way to look at things rather than going out in the field and same thing and frankly there's it limits yeah and I mean I am guilty of doing that as well because I was the person who started Ravish Ki report in Entiwenda took Ravish away from the studio and sent him into the field he had to do just one show a week and it was a great show it did extremely well but we got greedy and brought him into the studio back into the studio into the 9 p.m show right and he said this is what will work and Ravish himself had to move away from the field which is a different Ravish from what he became as an opinion right yeah now these are this is an inevitable thing that happened to everyone whether it is Arnab himself whether it is Barkha Dutt whether it is Srinivasan Jayan who continues to still do a certain kind of thing and Rajdeep or any of the people who you see on various channels have all become studio people right they're all news anchors there's no journalism left so in a sense journalism was dead already but what was happening in the studios there was a certain degree of balance there was a certain the nature of NDTV studio shows was to question yeah right and our question the opposition question those in power sometimes question the opposition as well because ultimately if you look at it the opposition is also in a sense part of the state all political parties are from the so you have to do that as well it's not as if the opposition says something you completely let them go right but your main objective was always to question institutions to question those who are ruling you that is completely gone yeah that is completely gone and this again I will say has is partly because of the decline of revenues as revenues went down as channels could no longer you know pay for journalism they became more and more dependent on advertisers and more and more dependent on corporate owners who would come and bail them out by taking buying stake whether it is the network 18 group which was bought by reliance or whether it is a tv today which had a certain amount of stake was bought by I think that they've been like group again these are all things which had to be done to raise funds to pay for just basic everyday news gathering yeah that was one process by which corporate control of news started taking place and you know the corporate don't have to come to your newsroom you already start self-sensoring when that happens yeah he said oh am I going to really write against Ambani or Adani or this Birla or Tata what will happen who knows yeah the fear sets in yeah you're censoring yourself because you know this advertiser might say yeah and then the sales guys come and luckily it never happened and there was a very strong Chinese wall which is why sales people never lasted anything they would come and say this is a terrible thing we're going right we have to wrap up okay so we have been asked to wrap up so we quickly wrap up so what I'm saying is that that process basically has led to where we are today right the fact that corporate control and corporates always want to curry favor with governments and that allows the government to enter the space and do what it has done today yeah various entities so that's the way it is and I guess there are many more stories to tell but yeah not another time yeah yeah okay great so if you have any more questions do write to us and do comment on this video yeah do subscribe to our channel news click we do great stuff and share 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