Senior Journalist, Editorial Director at India TV resigns over Modi’s fixed interview

Qamar Waheed Naqvi

Before the dust settled on the sniggering at the unabashed fan worship of Narendra Modi in what was supposed to be an interview by the supposedly sharp Rajat Sharma, news comes in of senior journalist and editorial director Qamar Waheed Naqvi resigning from IndiaTV in protest of the “fixed” interview.

The interview in question took “staged interview” to a whole new level from Modi’s staged interview with Madhu Kishwar (which later turned out to be old footage from her research for her worshipful epic on Narendra Modi). The audience for Modi’s interview with Rajat Sharma was packed with Modi fans who cheered at every single thing he said, while Rajat Sharma was acting like the sub-heading on an article optimized for Search Engines – highlighting the content rather than questioning anything.

To the best of my knowledge, the much acclaimed interview neither brought up any new information on Modi nor posed any uncomfortable questions.

Qamar Waheed Naqvi’s resignation in protest of the interview has gone unreported by mainstream media (as expected) and fits into a larger pattern of omerta on anything that makes BJP look bad in the run up to the election.

This fits into an election season strangely devoid of many experienced voices being nudged out of public vision. Another example of a missing commentator who won’t bend ethics is P Sainath. He doesn’t appear to have written on the Hindu this year at all, while tweets on Twitter indicate that the last anyone heard from him was when he pointed out in his Keynote Speech at “Zeitgeist” (a media conference by St Xavier’s College) on “Structural compulsions of the media to lie” that the coverage of Aam Aadmi Party changed drastically after they took on Ambani.

While Sainath is known best for his ground breaking work on the Agrarian Crisis, he is among the leading commentators on paid media and elections. His silence in what is turning out to be a Modi season of media is a story of its own.

(Visited 174 times, 1 visits today)

22 thoughts on “Senior Journalist, Editorial Director at India TV resigns over Modi’s fixed interview”

  1. Well i saw this episode of resign of Mr.Qamar in a different way. I am not saying he has done anything wrong by resigning, even i am supporting him if he had resigned on the issue of Generalism. What i am not able to understand is if he really care about the good generalism than why he took this decision so late. In my views india TV should not be treated as a NEWs or Media Channel it should be consider as a comedy channel. Since its appearence on indian tv the channel is unable to project or raise a single issue based news which is the very first thing about any news channel and if i am not wrong than Mr. Qamar was associated with the channel all these years. So i just want to say that there must be some other facts or i might say that intention of Mr. Qamar is might be disguisable.

  2. The resignation of Qamar Wheed Naqvi is a waking up call for media. The credibility of media has gone down. Professionals like Naqviji do not compromise with their integrity. He is very honest, able, and man of integrity. I have read him over a period of time very closely and he is one of the best journalist in India.

  3. Was the interview fixed? Its a rhetorical question. We all already know the truth, while propagandists will always answer, “No! The TV interview was not fixed! It was a conspiracy by development against development for development etc etc.”

  4. the credibility of media has gone to zero among the common people , the way media is showing modi it seems that they are going to win 500 seats , m not a congress man but there are also lots of party who are performing well but shame on this indian media…..

  5. dnt know fixed or not t ?? but for last 10 year almost all other indian english media is fixed against modi and glorified rahul gandhi along with tehela ..once socia media entered in picture modi used same against congress and congress medias .haha..smart modi giving reply in same coin used by congress agianst him …

  6. Seems you don’t watch Ambani TV these days. He was on the Election Tracker (their Opinion Polls) discussion panel on Prime Time.

  7. You are wrong. Absolutely wrong. He resigned because He is Muslims and hater of Modi, he didn’t like the fact that Modi is getting popularity through this interview. He was in such a senior position in India TV, why didn’t he bring this in notice to everyone earlier??? Entire interview was a fix, Audience was fix, Rajat sharma was a fix and no one knew about it? not a single leakage of interview shooting footage. All media group are pro congress/AAP and anti modi. Go and do some research. find out the nexus between Media and their links with Congress. Also google and read some tweets of this Nagqvi- he is a Muslim fanatic and Modi hater. No wonder if he gets a ticket from AAP after some days.

    1. lol and how can you be so sure about it ? and if it was a Hindu person who had quit would you finally believe it was fixed or would you come up with some other conspiracy theories to support your blind faith?
      what have you to say about this ?
      Exposed – the link between APCO Modi’s (PR agency ) and Hansa Research (NDTV’s polling agency)

      http://t.co/DOtq4VVspj

    1. My spellcheck had some issue – it didn’t recognize “IndiaTV” and I probably hurriedly approved correction without realizing it changed to NDTV. See title, it is IndiaTV, and the article is corrected. Thank you for pointing out.

Leave a Reply to Dpltcs Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *