Even though my 'direct' (insufferable) experience with Indian TV media in general and NDTV in particular is quite limited, I am not surprised that I have grown to love to hate Barkha Dutt of NDTV. She, in my opinion, represents the horrible state of 'news' media in India today. There was a time when I actually looked forward to watching NDTV -- when it was still new and was doing a pretty good job of covering general elections in India, something that had not been seen on Indian TV till then. I had grown to like it despite Prannoy Roy's obvious 'commie' links. Good work, done by whoever, should be applauded -- so I thought. Little did I know at that time that NDTV would reduce itself to the state it is in today -- and Barkha Dutt is, in my opinion, the face of that decline.
Anybody who saw her coverage of the Mumbai mayhem will either love her or hate her. If what she did during those terrible days wasn't enough, her (and NDTV's) flexing of muscles over a blog post that condemned her for the way she conducted herself as a journalist should make you either love her (really?) or hate her. :-)
I am not gonna write what exactly happened. Prem Panicker has done it very well and is worth reproducing it here via URL links:
First, read this post.
And then, this.
By the way, he does make a very good point. About the difference between opinion and fact. In today's online world where every other site is a personal blog, it is very important to keep this difference in mind when writing blog posts. A blog is not a personal diary -- what you write there can attract legal action even from the most unexpected quarters, as the Cheytanya Kunte-Barkha Dutt episode proves. So, writing responsibly is a wise idea.
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