Mumbai: Senior Journalist Barkha Dutt, who worked with NDTV for 21 long years, on Wednesday broke her silence and in a lambasting post on Facebook revealed why she had to resign from the channel, supposedly the crusader against the wrongdoings of the present dispensation.
Barkha however in her post wrote that the channel is neither a crusader nor a victim.
"I certainly don't see NDTV as either victim or crusader", she wrote in her post.
Alleging that some of his former colleagues for trying to take favour from BJP, Barkha wrote, "Maybe at that stage NDTV was trying to make peace with the BJP. Incidentally it's senior folks have approached a slew of govt ministers for help in the last few months while pretending to fight the BJP at Press Club and so on.. So utterly fake."
Barkha's Facebook post came after NDTV's Managing Editor Sreenivasan Jain took to social media and expressed his disapointment over its organisation's decison to take down his story on Jay Shah. He said that the management's decison to take down the story was an "aberration"
However in her post, Barkha revealed that this was not the first time the NDTV tried to censor the story.
"The axing of stories at NDTV is hardly new and those seeking the higher moral ground today remained absolutely silent when some of us fought with the owners and management over these issues", Barkha Dutt wrote in her post.
"An innocuous bread and butter interview I did with Chidambaram was taken off air during the aftermath of the surgical strikes. I have been sidelined from the major stories for taking step against management's decison of taking down stories.
"Over the next two months, for the stand I took, I was clearly punished with a hostile newsroom environment that sought to push me out of any big news story that the top bosses were anchoring. It was later told to me that my protest was seen as a "betrayal" and that I argued too much about the news. I was then offered a non daily- news", she wrote.
"It was quite uncomfortable situation for me being offered non- news section at that point of time when election was gearing up so I decided to resign", Barkha wrote.
Barkha Dutt said I have paid heavily for protesting against the censorship for both the BJP and Congress.
"I was punished for taking a stand and speaking my mind on news - censorship. The fights I had applied to both BJP and Congress stories", she wrote.
The fact that NDTV is under pressure came to light for the first time when the CBI raided the residences of the channel's bosses. Later reports claimed that a major stake of the channel has been sold out to a member of the BJP's 2014 campaign team. The report has not been officially challenged by the channel so far, though the staff claimed otherwise.
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