ABP News, one of India’s most watched Hindi news channels, has reportedly demanded an on-air apology from Arnab Goswami’s Republic TV after the latter portrayed one of the former’s reporters as a ‘goon’ during a live broadcast on Tuesday night.
Republic TV had broadcast images of several individuals from the venue of Jignesh Mevani’s rally in Delhi accusing them of having intimidated its reporter, Shivani Gupta.
Its on-screen headline attributed to Arnab Goswami had screamed, “Tonight I will put out videos circling the pictures of the vulgar thugs who tried to intimidate Shivani and failed.”
Among those whose images were circled in red were the husband of columnist Pratishtha Singh, and Jainendra Kumar, a reporter with ABP News.
ABP’s Abhisar Sharma took to Facebook to express his anger. He wrote angrily,
“Last night, not only did a so-called news channel Republic TV portray an innocent person as a goon, but also called one of India’s finest TV reporters, Jainendra Kumar, a goon by circling his image. What’s this channel about? Where have they come from? What kind of mentally sick people are running this channel? Who are goons here? It’s they who broadcast anything they wish, who defame others by taking supari from a particular political party. This is the first time a news channel has called a reporter from another news channel a goon. They are crossing every limit and there’s nobody, who can restrain these extortionists.”
Goswami has reportedly apologised to the reporter in question but sources told Janta Ka Reporter that ABP had demanded a formal on-air apology on Republic TV during his prime time show failing which the channel will file a defamation case against Republic TV.
Earlier on Wednesday, Pratishtha Singh had written a moving blog on Janta Ka Reporter expressing her disgust against Goswami and his channel for wrongly branding her husband as a goon.
We tried to contact Goswami for his response but he did not respond to our repeated calls. We will update the story once we hear from him.