On Saturday, News 18 Tamil Nadu, the Tamil news channel of the Network 18 group owned by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance, clipped the wings of its...
On Saturday, News 18 Tamil Nadu, the Tamil news channel of the Network 18 group owned by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance, clipped the wings of its senior editor M Gunasekaran.
Employees of the news channel Scroll.in spoke to said Gunasekaran has been divested of some powers and has been asked not to take editorial decisions on news coverage. However, an employee said he has been asked to continue anchoring debates, an important aspect of any television channel’s public image today.
In addition to the purported action against Gunasekaran, employees said several other decisions had been taken. These included asking a senior journalist to resign, while another journalist removed from anchoring the channel’s morning talk show.
The decisions came at the end of two weeks of sustained social media campaigns against Gunasekaran and several other journalists of the News 18 Tamil Nadu and other Tamil news channels like Puthiya Thalaimurai.
At the eye of the storm that has hit the Tamil media sector is a political play between two ideologically opposed groups. On the one side are supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, who have accused the news channels of propagating an anti-BJP and anti-Narendra Modi viewpoint in their evening debates. On the...
