The Billionaire Raj

by James Crabtree

  The studio was surprisingly cramped: two dozen young journalists crowded round a central news desk packed with monitors, hammering silently at their keyboards, before occasionally shouting at one another across the room. The decor matched the channel’s colors: blue and red chairs sat at blue and red desks on top of a blue and red carpet. A single flash of orange ringed the main desk, bearing the slogan “WE CHANGED THE NEWS.” There was a noticeboard in one corner covered in A4 sheets, advertising the channel’s successes. One read: “Credibility Brings Supreme Leadership.” It pictured Goswami, looking serious with his arms folded, next to a pie chart that showed Times Now’s audience share at a dominant fifty percent, lording it over NDTV, which had barely half as much.

  Goswami was easily the oldest employee, and eyes turned whenever he emerged from his office and paced through the studio, firing questions about that evening’s lineup. The hubbub increased as 9 p.m. approached. “Challo! Breaking! Breaking breaking!” one producer shouted with about fifteen minutes to go, as news filtered through about a developing spat between India and Pakistan. Until then, Goswami was to lead the program with a political squabble in the state of Uttarakhand, although he seemed unenthused about the story, searching for a better option. Now a frantic debate began. “I want to see the visuals again,” shouted another producer. “Are we going with that story or not?!” yelled a third.

  With just a few minutes to go, Goswami, still dressed in his kurta, dashed off suddenly into a back room, and then emerged a minute or two later into the lights of the studio. I turned to watch on a monitor: the introductory credits announced that “SUPER PRIME TIME” had begun. The camera panned in on the host, who sat transformed, dressed in a dark blue tie, matching blue shirt and sharp black suit, his hair now slicked back. The phrase “INDIA REJECTS PAK VIDEO CLAIM” burst onto the screen, as Goswami launched into a fiery monologue about Pakistan’s decision to release footage supposedly showing the confession of a captured Indian spy—a minor diplomatic kerfuffle, but now firmly that night’s top story. Later, still on Pakistan, Goswami moved on to a rowdy discussion segment called the “burning question,” which was signified by the appearance of flickering digital flames all across the bottom of the screen.

  Such theatrics make it easy to lament the state of Indian television news, and many in the country do just that. Rajdeep Sardesai, a more self-critical figure than his main rival, has lamented his industry’s obsession with the “three Cs”—crime, cinema, and cricket—describing them as a “triple-headed deity at whose altar the industry worships.”11 More telling is what newspaper editor T. N. Ninan dubbed the rise of “vigilante TV,” with Goswami as its leader. “Impartiality is for the clubby Prannoy Roys of the world,” as Ninan put it. “TV news Rottweilers in attack mode have proved for many to be as riveting as any soap opera. Breaking news is now about smashing reputations.”12

  Many also blame Goswami for a wider decline, given the way his style has been copied not just by other channels in English, which reach barely a tenth of the population, but also by those in Hindi and other languages, which are now often even more tabloid in orientation. Either way, the rapid increase in the quantity of political news has clearly not resulted in a broader political consensus. The basic details of important national events—the role of Narendra Modi in the Gujarat riots of 2002, for instance—often remain fiercely contested. “In India, the problem is nothing is ever really true,” I was once told by Jonathan Shainin, an American who worked for years as a magazine editor in New Delhi. By this, Shainin meant that the extraordinarily adversarial nature of public discussion, most obviously on television, often seemed to make even minimal factual agreement impossible. “Long before we all became interested in ‘fake news,’ it was right there, you know? India was kind of the pioneer.”

  There is something exhilarating about India’s raucous news media, especially when viewed next to its staid and timid competitors in many other Asian countries. The press is not exactly free—it ranked just 136th in the 2017 World Press Freedom list published by the charity Reporters without Borders—but it is often fearless.13 The print industry is thriving, with rising readership especially in languages other than English, in clear contrast to the struggling newspaper empires of the West. Most TV news channels lose money, but broadcasters in general are handily profitable, and reach an audience of more than three quarters of a billion, easily the largest of any country outside China.14 The media also played an undeniably important role in helping to bring to an end the scandals that plagued India in the early part of this decade.

  Still, when we met, I pushed Goswami on the downsides of his combative style, and especially the trade-off between attracting attention and accurate reporting. Mostly he declined to admit that any such tension existed, describing his style simply as “a more aggressive” form of traditional journalism. “The idea is not to impose your point of view on anyone,” he told me. “The idea is to generate [and] elicit the strongest and best response.” He rejected, in particular, the comparison with outlets like Fox News, denying the US channel had been an inspiration. “People may want to flatter themselves thinking that this has evolved from some inspiration from America,” he argued. “We have our own cultural editorial style, our syntax, our own grammar. And I’ve never watched much of these channels.” It was hard to tell if this was strictly speaking accurate. “[Goswami] has said to me that he has followed the Fox News model in many ways,” I was told by the head of one media organization around the same time.

  As much as on this uncompromising style, Goswami’s popularity also rested on a kind of moral authenticity, in an industry that itself had struggled to win public trust. Although it reported forcefully on corruption, Indian media had struggled to avoid the perception that it too had become corrupted, given the widespread problem of what was known as “paid news,” corporate or political interests gaining or removing coverage for cash. It is hard to know the extent of this problem, although industry figures often told me it was widespread. More broadly, Indian proprietors still cheerfully jumble up adverts, editorial, and paid-for “advertorial,” with the latter especially prominent in news stories related to upcoming Bollywood releases.

  Vineet Jain, one of the brothers who own both Times Now and the Times of India, displayed a notably relaxed attitude to editorial standards. “We are not in the newspaper business,” he once told The New Yorker. “If ninety percent of your revenues comes from advertising, you’re in the advertising business.”15 There were anxieties too about the influence of big business on media ownership, most obviously when Mukesh Ambani took over the company that owned CNN-IBN in 2014. Shortly after the tycoon’s purchase, Goswami’s rival Rajdeep Sardesai, the channel’s editor, resigned, along with a number of other senior executives.16

  Perhaps the most damaging episode came a few years earlier, when police recordings were leaked of conversations involving Niira Radia, a public relations guru, whose clients included both Ambani and Ratan Tata, patriarch of the Tata group. The ensuing “Radia tapes” scandal engulfed a number of senior journalists by appearing to expose a world in which business and political rivals attacked one another anonymously through the press, aided by supposedly impartial reporters. The farrago provided particular succor to Goswami, who used it repeatedly to lambast the “Lutyens” elite and the cozy links they maintained with corporate and political power brokers. “It’s downright shameful,” Goswami wrote to his staff when the tapes emerged, in a memo that was quickly leaked. “No gifts, no favors, no lobbying, no free dining and wining,” he warned his own staff. “If I hear of any, we will come down hard.”

  Goswami’s ability to avoid any taint of corruption only added to his popular appeal, allowing him to paint himself as the master of an uncomplicated evening morality plan. Times Now launched in a moment of economic change, in which many old certainties were being upturned. Yet as India seemed to be losing its moral bearings, with vene
rated business houses beset by scandals and politicians mired in corruption, Goswami provided a measure of moral clarity. It was a style even his competitors admitted was effective. “Arnab is very smart, he is very good, he is very quick on the draw, he is infuriating if you don’t like his views, but he is very, very good,” the editor Shekhar Gupta once told me. It helped that Goswami seemed to revel in his position as moral arbiter too. “I don’t believe in creating an artificial consensus,” he told me. “If there is something wrong, you can ask yourself two questions: ‘Why did it happen? Will the people who did it go unpunished?’ ” He added: “I’ve often said this: that, in a choice between right and wrong, black and white, the facts that stare you in your face, will you not take a side on what is right?”

  Battle Hymn of the Republic

  About a month after he quit Times Now, I met Goswami again in Mumbai. At the time, he had said little about his plans to launch a new channel, although he was clearly busy. He would fly back from meetings in New Delhi on Saturday afternoon, he told me over the phone, and then go straight to meet Uddhav Thackeray, the head of the Shiv Sena, the right-wing political party that had run Mumbai for a generation or more. I should come to Thackeray’s home, he said, from where we could talk in the car as he drove downtown to give a speech.

  The Thackeray house had been notorious. A tightly guarded mansion called Matoshree, in an enclave not far from the airport, it had belonged to Thackeray’s father, Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena’s founder and leader, until his death a few years before. A newspaper cartoonist turned political godfather, the elder Thackeray ran Mumbai as a personal dominion, fomenting ill feeling towards migrants and occasionally using mob violence to shut down the city entirely. Matoshree was his seat of power, the place where he received visitors and dispensed justice, sitting on a throne engraved with two golden lions. As he plotted his own channel, Goswami felt the need to pay respect to Thackeray’s son, who now controlled his father’s party, and thus the city as well.

  It was a sunny December afternoon as I strolled past the twin machine-gun posts at the entrance and headed into the colony beyond. Filled with sleepy old bungalows, the street provided a rare moment of calm amid the clamor of Mumbai, with no traffic to speak of and the distant sound of birdsong up above. For all its fearsome reputation, Matoshree, which stood at the end of the lane on the left, was unassuming: a four-story home with an A-shaped roof that would not have looked out of place in a central European suburb, barring the orange flags on its high perimeter walls, and the fleet of luxury saloons with blacked-out windows parked at the front. Armed guards ushered me through the security gates and into a largely empty ground-floor reception area, with hundreds of cream-colored plastic chairs stacked up to one side. A life-size photograph of the deceased leader, dressed all in white except for a generous red bindi daubed on his forehead, stood propped against the back wall. His old throne sat unused in a corner, its twin golden lions looking badly in need of a polish. A garland of marigolds lay abandoned on the seat.

  Goswami and Thackeray emerged looking relaxed about ten minutes later, and after brief pleasantries, Goswami ushered me back outside towards his car, a modest saloon. The afternoon light was fading as we pulled back out down the lane, and his driver turned left onto the main road, rejoining the blaring rush of evening traffic. Sitting in the back seat, Goswami was dressed stylishly in a dark shirt. His hair was bushier than I remembered, as if he had dared to let it to grow long now he was no longer on air each evening. He missed the nightly thrill of broadcasting, he admitted, but had been kept busy meeting potential financial backers, hiring journalists, and jumping through regulatory hoops to get his planned new channel off the ground. His departure from Times Now had been front-page news. But intense outside interest in his new venture didn’t bother him, he said, nor did the bad blood it left behind with his former employees, who had even begun court proceedings demanding he no longer use his favored “the nation wants to know” phrase on his new channel.17 “It’s exhilarating,” he told me as we pulled onto the city’s Sea Link bridge and began speeding south, the skyscrapers of midtown glinting off to our left. “When you’re in a steady ship, it’s boring.”

  I asked why he’d quit. Goswami sidestepped, talking animatedly about how his new channel would respond to wider forces, not least a bulging population of young Indian smartphone users, who he said were no longer interested in watching broadcast television. Tens of millions were coming online this way each month, he said. TV stations were losing advertisers. Print publications, while ostensibly healthy, were under pressure as well. Newspapers were still delivered to readers’ homes each morning, but advertisers were beginning to cotton on to the industry’s dirtiest secret, namely how many of these went unopened and thus unread. Eventually even the young men paid a pittance to squeeze broadsheets under front doors in cities like Mumbai and New Delhi would want to find better jobs. “The day the delivery boy goes out of the print industry, print ends,” Goswami said. “It’s not going to be a gradual thing. It’s going to be a cliff edge.”

  By contrast, his own new venture would be a largely digital affair, designed for social-media-savvy twenty-somethings as much as political news obsessives. Goswami explained all this in a quiet voice as we rumbled south, addressing me often by my first name, a subdued style that I had come to recognize as part of his studiously calm offscreen personality. Yet from time to time he became visibly excited too. “I’ll do it. It’s a bloody exciting road, yaar!” he said at one point, thumping his hand against the seat between us for emphasis. “Only we can do it, James. Only we!” he added with patriotic gusto. “We are the only democracy that is English speaking, has technology, has young people, right? Only we. There’s nowhere in the world you can do this!”

  Behind the optimism there was still the sound of scores being settled. Goswami spoke respectfully of his old employers, but the frustrations he had felt as an underling to the Jains were clear. At Times Now he had run a news channel that was his in every way except the one that really mattered: ownership. Now he had the chance to launch a new venture that was his entirely. The idea of being a proprietor—and thus, in his own way, a tycoon—seemed to fit his personality. Rivals like Rajdeep Sardesai cherished their reporting backgrounds, returning often to rural villages and distant states to look into stories. They also tried to build intellectual reputations, writing books on national politics and firing off op-eds on the issues of the day. Goswami bothered little with any of this, rarely leaving the newsroom. It was this mastery of the studio that had made him India’s most recognized journalist, albeit one who still insisted on portraying himself as a rank outsider. “It is now a David–Goliath fight, I am up against behemoths of Indian media,” he said at one point, without naming any in particular. “Professional journalists in India are not expected to play the big game. They are expected to loyally serve the existing media organizations.” His ire at his competitors—“My bigger battle, James, is with the Lutyens group”—had, if anything, become more pronounced.

  The new channel also provided a vehicle for Goswami’s global ambitions. He’d been to Moscow, he said, to visit Russia Today, the Kremlin-backed operation known for its anti-American views. He’d watched the rise of Al Jazeera, too. The fact that India had nothing similar seemed shaming. “We are present everywhere in the world, from garment exports to software. But we have no presence globally in the media,” he told me, as we crawled south through the city. “Everything we do henceforth in media has to be about scaling up…and about our soft power. Our reach in the world.” The narrowness of domestic media seemed to irk him, with its scant global coverage and particular local obsessions: international politicians of vaguely Indian descent, desi Indians abroad who have done well in their particular fields, or the predicaments of Indian tourists or students in foreign countries; all genres Goswami himself had done much to popularize. “Why is it that when I seek an interview with Donald
Trump, I’m only going to ask, ‘Mr. Trump, what message do you have for Indians?’ ” he said. “An Indian journalist, interviewing an American statesman, does not have to be about what you’re going to do for India. It’s wrong, James. What we have done to Indian media is wrong.”

  There was something captivating about this global vision. Given time, Goswami was surely right: somebody in India would indeed one day launch a global news channel, which could well go on to take its place alongside the BBC or CNN. But the ambition still sat oddly next to Republic itself, which, when it launched six months later, was if anything even more narrowly parochial than its domestically obsessed predecessor. Republic’s style and content mimicked the bombast of Times Now, only much more so. The graphics were in different colors, but they whizzed around just as rapidly. In one early episode of his own show—which still aired at 9 p.m., and was still called The Newshour—Goswami crammed a full dozen guests on-screen, achieving a new level of stupefying incomprehensibility. Of the channel’s promised digital innovations, there were few to be seen.

  The most striking change involved the channel’s politics, which were more obviously populist and nationalist than before. Goswami launched with a flimsy exposé targeted at Shashi Tharoor, the debonair Congress politician. Debates about Kashmir proved enduringly popular, allowing Goswami to rail against two favored enemies at once: duplicitous Pakistanis on the one hand, and disloyal liberals on the other, for suggesting that India, with its heavy military presence and grim human rights record, might bear some responsibility for the Muslim-majority state’s outbursts of violence. “We represent the REAL INDIA,” Goswami wrote during a discussion on Reddit, not long before Republic’s launch. “All Indians should be pro-military and pro-India. If that makes us right wing, then so be it.”18