He™s the individual everyone loves to hate and according to Outlook magazine, the man who killed the 9 p.m news. But there™s no denying there™s a je ne sais quoi appeal in the argumentative nine o™clock news format devised by Arnab Goswami, the combative anchor of the nightly news telecast on the Times Now channel. Although there™s much head-shaking and condemnation about the slanging matches on his 90-minute five-nights-per-week News Hour, it™s Times Now™s proud boast that its audience is bigger than of all half-a-dozen English language 9 p.m news channels combined. According to a recent report of the Broadcast Audience Research Council promoted in 2011 by broadcasters, advertisers and government to supplant the compromised TAM (Televison Audience Measurement) Media Research promoted in 2006 by A.C. Nielsen and Kantar Media Research (UK), the News Hour commands a 76 percent share of the English language 9 p.m news viewership. There™s no shortage of explanations why Goswami has the country™s most influential English-speaking elite in a thrall. The explanation of your editor, who also loves to hate Goswami, is that the News Hour™s coverage of political issues is cleverly mixed with expos©s of in-your-face VIP arrogance, police corruption and apathy, medical negligence and civic maladministration which directly affect lay people and which other anchors (and editors) consider too unimportant in the cosmic order of things. Moreover, he seems totally unafraid about puncturing humbug and plucking the mighty from their seats while exalting the humble and meek. That™s a winning formula. Yet it™s curious that the lords and masters of Bennett Coleman & Co, which owns Times Now (and numerous money-spinning Times of India group print publications), who have a reputation for cutting overweening editors who discomfit incumbent governments to size, have given Goswami unprecedented freedom to take on all comers, be they ever so high. And the way things are going, the only threat to India™s most pro-consular (œthe nation needs to know) television interrogator is from within. Circling culture vultures Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler™s infamous propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels famously said: œWhen I hear the word ˜culture™ I reach for my gun. That could well become the reaction of the country™s small and shrinking intelligentsia to the utterances of the high and mighty within the BJP which was swept to power in the General Election of 2014 when the effete epicurean leaders of the Congress party handed them victory on a platter. Since then during the past 18 months, ill-informed but highly-opinionated spokespersons of the ragtag and bobtail affiliate organisations of the RSS ” the ideological mentor of the BJP which is committed to establishing a Hindu rashtra in India ” known as the sangh parivar (RSS family) have been regularly sounding off on wide-ranging cultural and moral issues which have aroused the hatred, ridicule and contempt of liberal academics and intellectuals. Recently Mahesh Sharma, Union minister of state for tourism and culture ” who presumably abhors the Western culture of social interaction of unmarried men and women ” went on…
