NDTV | The outlier in a noisy television news space

The channel that has played a role in modernising India’s TV news reporting and has never shied away from taking critical positions on the government could be controlled by the Adani Group soon

Merely hours after a Fitch Group unit, CreditSights, came up with a report that called the Adani Group “deeply overleveraged” and that the group’s “overly ambitious debt-funded growth plans could… spiral into a massive debt trap”, the Adani Group, in an unrelated press release, said it had made a bid to take over NDTV by first indirectly acquiring a 29.18% stake and then by making an open offer for another 26% ownership stake in the media entity.

NDTV is one of India’s most well-known media brands, with its flagship NDTV 24/7 being a pioneer of sorts in the English television news space, its website NDTV.com being among the most read English news websites and some of its current and erstwhile anchors being well recognised public figures. In a survey published in the recent Reuters Institute Digital News Report for 2022 — whose respondents were mainly English-speaking online news users in India — NDTV online polled the highest weekly usage, and while 24-hour TV news channels were perceived by survey respondents as being less-well-trusted compared with print counterparts, NDTV ranked the highest among Indian TV outlets.

It’s ironic that CreditSights’ warning for the Adani Group that a debt trap could leave some of its companies in distress was exactly how a similar situation played out for the media entity after a series of financial transactions made by the promoters of NDTV led the company into the financial doldrums in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Television news in India today is a cluttered space with several English news channels — many of whose editors cut their teeth at NDTV — and the model of news business is also much changed from what it was when NDTV pioneered the modernisation of TV news reporting in India. NDTV was launched in 1984 by Radhika and Prannoy Roy first as a production house for news broadcasts that were predominantly made for the monopoly TV network and state-owned Doordarshan before becoming a commercial news network in 1988. Radhika Roy had a career in journalism with stints in the  Indian Express and  India Today before co-founding NDTV, while Prannoy Roy worked as macroeconomist at Delhi School of Economics with a distinct interest in psephology after completing his doctoral degree at the same institute besides being a certified chartered accountant.

NDTV’s best known offering in the late 1980s on Doordarshan was the slickly produced ‘The World This Week’, a news programme that brought reporting and analysis of world events. Soon, NDTV went on to produce special shows related to election coverage and analysis, budget specials and then broadcast a daily news bulletin on DD Metro. These shows were appreciated for bringing a reporter-driven focus and production values of an international standard — with live (or near-live) dispatches from reporters, graphics and the use of file images and videos. This was a strong contrast to the more staid and desk-read out news bulletins brought out by Doordarshan and soon NDTV’s model of news gathering and presentation became popular, transforming television news.

NDTV went on to launch a 24-hour news channel in partnership with Star India in 1998 before branching out on its own as an independent broadcaster in 2003. It followed a strategy of recruiting talent with familial ties to the establishment—bureaucracy, polity military, etc. Besides being reporter-driven in its news gathering and presentation, the channel also promoted its anchors who gained sufficient mileage and attention, becoming the faces of the news network. Some of these anchors — Rajdeep Sardesai and Arnab Goswami — branched out to new news networks as editors and ‘star’ anchors quickly, others such as Barkha Dutt remained for a few years before moving out while some such as Sreenivasan Jain, Sonia Singh and Vishnu Som continue to ply their work at the channel.

The larger-than-life promotion of anchors as arbiters of news had its own set of consequences: anchors at NDTV, apart from other news organisations, were accused not only of closeness to the establishment but using it to undercut reporting the inner workings of the government-corporate nexus as the later release of the Radia Tapes and its aftermath revealed.