Arnab Goswami on Tuesday night slammed his former colleague, Navika Kumar of Times Now, for her 8-minute-long monologue recalling her difficulties in filling into the controversial anchor’s shoes when the latter quit the Times Group to launch his new TV channel in 2016. Addressing his guests, Goswami mocked Kumar as he said, “People say they found it difficult to walk in my shoes…I want to tell them I carried my shoes with me (when I left Times Now). So nobody is walking into my shoes. I carried my shoes with me and walked into Republic.”
Goswami was referring to Kumar’s monologue that Times Now shared on Twitter on Monday. Navika had started her show with an 8-minute monologue as she said, “Tonight ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know, I just want to begin on a personal note. I know it’s not my place to talk about personal things on a show when I am a journalist, a news person.”
Kumar went on to add that she was persuaded to quit her job at The Indian Express by Arnab Goswami to join his team ahead of the launch of the Times Now TV channel. She said that she had learnt the craft of TV broadcast from Goswami, so when the latter left the channel in 2016, she found it hard to step into his shoes.
“The most difficult thing for me was to fill his shoes (in 2016) when I was asked to front News Hour, which was associated with Arnab for 12 years,” Kumar said adding that she wished with a ‘heavy heart’ that Goswami had not forgotten the ‘fundamentals of human value system’ in his quest to achieve commercial success with Republic TV that he launched in 2016.
Entire TV Journalism industry needs to just vanish. We have now seen the worst of the worst. They have now reduced to cannibalism. And no one, I repeat no one is doing journalism here. None. https://t.co/8ofCaeuM6x
— Sunanda Vashisht (@sunandavashisht) January 18, 2021
The alleged leaked WhatsApp chat between Arnab Goswami and the former CEO of BARC, Partho Dasgupta, prompted Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to launch a blistering attack on the Centre’s Narendra Modi government as he asked if the prime minister himself had tipped off the Republic TV founder about the Balakot airstrikes. Gandhi had said that Pakistan too may have been aware of the airstrikes if Goswami knew about India’s secret military operations.