Press Censorship: Hindustan Times editor is sacked, apparently at the behest of NaMo

by Guest Thu Sep 28, 2017 12:51 pm

New Delhi: Hindustan Times (HT) proprietor Shobhana Bhartia’s decision to announce the abrupt exit of Bobby Ghosh as editor was preceded by a personal meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and objections raised by top-level government and Bharatiya Janata Party officials to editorial decisions taken during Ghosh’s tenure.

The government insists the meeting was “confined to” Bhartia’s efforts to secure Modi’s participation in a flagship HT event. But sources in the newspaper say that in the run-up to that meeting, she faced sustained objections from senior ministers to aspects of HT’s political coverage, to Ghosh’s own views expressed on social media, and to the fact that he does not hold Indian citizenship. One of these minsters had even hinted at escalating matters to Modi.

Ghosh, a journalist and editor with extensive worldwide experience, joined HT in May 2016 after successful runs as managing editor of Quartz and editor of TIME magazine’s international edition. His 16-month stint is widely seen as having perked up the 90-year-old newspaper, even if some of his editorial initiatives – notably the ‘Hate Tracker’ – have rubbed the BJP-led political establishment the wrong way.

His departure from HT was announced by Bhartia on September 11. The fact that Bhartia’s statement did not say Ghosh had resigned, but that he would “be returning to New York for personal reasons” – and that Ghosh has made no public statement of his own – is seen as a sign within the organisation that his exit was forced...

Senior staff within HT who raised this point with Bhartia and her advisers were told, “It is one thing for The Hindu to have defended Siddharth Varadarajan when he came under attack from Swamy. What does one do if the [highest levels of government] make this an issue?”...

Meanwhile, in the first concrete indication of a shift in editorial direction following Ghosh’s exit, HT appears to be distancing itself from the newspaper’s ‘Hate Tracker’.

In the days after Ghosh’s exit, a handful of senior journalists from other media organisations tweeted that the ‘Hate Tracker’ was one among a number of issues that the former editor-in-chief had received criticism over.

Multiple journalists The Wire spoke to at HT also indicated that the tracker could have been among the “last straws” that precipitated Ghosh’s exit.

The last time the Hindustan Times appears to have tweeted a message regarding their hate tracker was on September 13, 2017, two days after Ghosh resigned and just 20 minutes before Rustagi’s email with Mahapatra’s instructions was sent out.
Employees within the media organisation confirmed that while work on the hate tracker still “officially continued”, social media teams were informally told that it should be publicised less on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

The last time the hate tracker was updated was on on September 19, 2017, to add a story – ‘BJP leader slaps girl repeatedly for relations with Muslim man’.

In the weeks after its launch, the hate tracker received a significant amount of negative coverage from India’s right-wing digital ecosystem, including Twitter handles followed by Modi.

When launching the hate tracker, HT explained its rationale by stating that when people of certain ethnicities and religion are humiliated, beaten or killed, “violence or abuse may be punished, but bigotry is not… That makes it impossible to know the extent of the problem. There is no national database of hate crimes,” a news report announcing the launch said.

https://thewire.in/178102/hindustan-times-bobby-ghosh-narendra-modi-shobhana-bhartia/