Arnab Goswami, President-News & Editor-in-Chief, Times Now and ET Now, is IMPACT Person of the Year, 2015, for revolutionizing English television news in India, setting the agenda for accountability in the system with his brilliant journalism and taking Times Now to steady leadership
INTERVIEWED BY SRABANA LAHIRI
When I meet Arnab Goswami one December afternoon, he is anything but his fiery prime-time avatar - soft-spoken to a fault, warm and relaxed. He nurses a green tea (much against his wishes) to cure a sore throat, and turns out to be as good an interviewee as he is an interviewer. He tells me that he has been invited to speak at an international media event in Moscow on the role of global media in a multipolar world, and is excited about the subject. We chat about the business of broadcast, Arnab’s experiences as a journalist and seeking truth in the time of falsehood. At the end of it, he asks if I am satisfied with the interview!
Back home the same evening, I tune in to Newshour. The transformation is sublime – Arnab is in full form, talking to multiple panelists at a time, and the decibel levels completely belie the sore throat. It is business as usual.
Meanwhile, if ‘the Nation wants to know’ the one truth that I uncovered about Arnab Goswami that afternoon, it is this: for the last 10 years, the jaded floor of the Newshour studio at Times Now has not been refurbished, as the man who takes charge of the studio at prime time to drive it to dizzy levels of viewership is superstitious about it and fears that the magic will go away if the flooring is changed!
Q&A: ‘Be No. 1 always with the hunger of a No. 2’
‘Pressure doesn’t work on me, it’s like water off a duck’s back…’
Arnab Goswami, President -News & Editor-in-Chief, Times Now and ET Now, is at the top of his game, having created Brand Times Now from scratch and added to it his own brand of incisive journalism, to take it to a steady No. 1 among English news channels. He has not only spearheaded major exposes against corruption in the country, compelling action at the highest level, but set the agenda for the 2014 General Elections with his exclusive interviews of Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi. His shows Newshour on prime time and ‘Frankly Speaking’ have unmatched viewership and impact.
For Arnab, celebrity status has also brought detractors, but he is well equipped to handle both, laughing off the allegations from various quarters and spoofs that do the rounds of social media. However, he himself is not on social media, as he “does not have enough time”. On his to-do list is reinventing Newshour in a more interactive format, and introducing citizen journalism. Also, bringing in more innovations on TV, provided he can manage time.
Here are excerpts from a conversation in which Arnab traces his evolution as a journalist right from his early days, sharing rare anecdotes from his career and looking ahead into the future.
‘I ran back from school to watch Salma Sultan announce Indira Gandhi’s assassination on DD…’
Arnab’s earliest recollection of watching television is a weekend sports bulletin by Anupam Gulati on Doordarshan. But the first news-break he remembers is the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984. “I remember rushing back from my school, Mount St. Mary’s in Delhi, the day Indira Gandhi was shot. We used to live in Janakpuri. It was Salma Sultan announcing the news on DD, and I watched that bulletin as the news was delivered. I used to obsess about all news bulletins... I must have been in Class X or XI when Prannoy Roy started ‘The World This Week’, on Fridays. But more than TV, I actually listened to a lot of radio, shortwave radio was great fun,” says Arnab. As a child, he did not have a fixed goal, but by the time he was in college, he had decided to be a lawyer or a journalist. “Clarity about being a journalist came only after I got into television,” recalls Arnab, adding that even in his first year as a sub-editor at The Telegraph in Kolkata in 1994, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to be a journalist. But he became hungry for bylines.
‘I was hungry for bylines. If I didn’t get a byline every day, I would obsess about it…’
“At the Telegraph, I wanted to put out as many bylines as I could, I was hungry for bylines. If I didn’t get a byline every day, I would obsess about it. But, I did not have any field experience. With a degree in Social Anthropology from Oxford, my view of the world was fairly theoretical. That, combined with the fact that I was on the editorial page, allowed me to do a lot of punditry with a huge number of bylines. But by the end of year one, I realized something was missing,” recalls Arnab who finally left the Telegraph to become a television reporter in New Delhi, just as the sector was opening up and Doordarshan gave way to privately-owned TV channels. One reason he left The Telegraph, he says jokingly, was his inefficiency with QuarkExpress, the new page-making software that had just been introduced. “I was really bad at it. But I was very good at cut-and-paste page-making, and famous in the art room for that. I would love the smell of gum and paper, the scissors… But suddenly, computers came and I just could not fathom two things - how the modem worked in the newsroom, and how QuarkExpress worked. One of the reasons I fled The Telegraph is because I realized I was never going to be able to make a page on QuarkExpress!” he says. The real reason, of course, was that Arnab was hungry for reporting assignments. In Delhi, he joined NDTV. “At NDTV I did a live one day outside the CPM office, and Harkishen Singh Surjeet, a big political player, was talking to me. A person called IK Gujral walked in, and I remember waving my hands and saying that I have IK Gujral with me, let’s go live. And from the PCR where Prannoy was anchoring, I was asked ‘Who is IK Gujral?’ Within six months, he was Prime Minister of India. Those were very interesting times,” he recalls.
One of his favourite stories is the one about an interview with Sonia Gandhi on the tarmac of Chennai airport, when she was thinking of coming into politics. On the flight back from an assignment at Sriperumbudur where Sonia was speaking, Arnab ran desperately from Economy to Business class and shouted out to her that he wanted an interview. He was totally desperate and broke through her SPG cover, but she walked away. A few minutes later, he was summoned to the tarmac. “I was sure that I’d be arrested for my behaviour. I ran down with my cameraperson and there was Ms Gandhi waiting to talk to me. That’s where her first television interview happened. It was huge at that time. When it aired, it had huge impact,” he recalls. However, though he became a political reporter and spent a lot of time on the ground, he says he never really evolved as an anchor at NDTV. “I’d say it’s only in the last six or seven years that I evolved as an anchor…,”he adds.
‘I get a thrill when I am flying against the wind… Times Now has been a wonderful platform’
Ask Arnab about the qualities of a leader and instances where he took on a leadership role early on, and he says, “Putting together a team at Times Now. It began with two weeks of non-stop interviews out of a company guest-house, conversations with at least 600-700 people, maybe I interviewed about 1,000 people in all in that period.”
Around that time, he took to heart one piece of advice he received: “Uday (Shankar) told me this when I left NDTV: ‘The challenge in life is to fly solo.’ So if you ask me what I learnt about being a leader, it is the ability to fly solo. Fly solo in the decision that you take. Fly solo in the belief that you have. Fly solo when everybody around will tell you that the way you are running your team and your channel is not correct. But if you believe that you are doing the right thing, honestly with the right values, and with the right amount of hard work, that’s leadership. For me, the formative years of Times Now, was an incredible period and a transformative experience because I realized that I was usually flying against the wind. And, I get a thrill when I am flying against the wind.”
The Jains of Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd, of course, placed a big bet on a relatively unknown Arnab Goswami while entrusting him with their new venture, Times Now. He stood them in good stead and describes his relationship with them over the years as “great”. “This has been a wonderful platform. Over the last 10 years, we have incubated some great journalism. We have done stories which people felt could not have been done on television. In all this time, I have had a great relationship with my share-holders and with the group. And I think it’s wonderful to see the television business grow in this way. I am fortunate to be a part of that process,” says Arnab.
Recalling early challenges, he admits that he made a mistake trying to do three things on the channel at the start - programming, business and news. “I may have been immature in hoping that we would get the stickiness of business content, the impact of news, and the perception of good programming. We tried very hard to make it work. But I think we failed. As a lesson in leadership, it was a very important period in my life,” recalls Arnab, talking of a time when Times Now’s ratings took a beating, only to soar dramatically later.
‘Brand Arnab is an extension of Brand Times Now, which stands for certain values and ethics…’
It has often been said that Brand Arnab Goswami overwhelms Brand Times Now, and media circles have sought to decipher whether that is good or bad for the channel. “Well, I think any channel would aspire to have the kind of channel share in super prime time that we have,” says Arnab. “Everyone in the industry appreciates the viewership that Newshour has. It is the function of the trust that people have in this show. And it’s not been built overnight, but through the years when we sailed against the wind and exposed five scams that brought corruption to the fore. Be it questioning VVIPs, the anti-racism campaign, or Lalitgate… when a lot of people felt that we would not ask equally tough questions of this government as we did to the Congress, we proved everyone wrong. The result of that is the viewership that my show gets. It should not be looked at from a narrow prism of Brand Arnab vs Brand Times Now. Brand Times Now stands for certain values in journalism, certain ethics. And Brand Arnab is an extension of that.
I am no longer swayed by my own highs and lows professionally. What gives me maximum happiness is to see a reporter from Times Now with a selfie stick beating all international crew while reporting live from Brussels after the Paris attacks.”
He talks about the genesis of his own brand of journalism, saying that he’d always felt too much indirect journalism went on in television. “I felt people don’t talk straight, and this is not the way you are supposed to be on television. I asked myself, are we too affected on Indian news TV? Are we too ‘proper’? Are we too mechanical? Or rather, are we too scripted? And I always felt that we are. But I never got an opportunity to break that until I came to Times Now. If I learnt one thing through my first 10 years at NDTV, it was that a huge chasm has grown between the viewer and English news television in India. English news television was seen to be slow, too close to the establishment, too soft, and too affected. I knew I had to break that at some point of time. It’s just that I got my chance at Times Now, through the stories, through the language, through the stance. We did things that people did not expect English news channels to do,” he says.
‘I realized that the problem in television was that we beat around the bush…’
Somewhere in his own mind, Arnab realizes that the problem in television is that reporters do not come to the nub of the issue, but beat around the bush. “We think we intellectualize, but what we actually do is distance our viewer from us. The challenge is to bring the viewer closer to us. So if you look at the last seven years of journalism at Times Now, it is activist journalism in the sense that we pick up issues in a way that people want them picked up, not in the way that a ‘journalist’ wants to report. That was literally the third part of my evolution, after being a fairly theoretical edit page writer at the Telegraph to being a hardcore political reporter and gathering strong ground experience at NDTV. It was my opportunity to break away and set the editorial agenda in the way that I know it, something I did only at Times Now,” he explains.
Another step was undoing the practice of labelling people’s stories as unimportant stories. According to Arnab, “It was an act of snobbery by the media, and Times Now challenged it and broke the paradigm. This was a very interesting phase over the last six or seven years and I can tell you many stories. We evolve through our own experiences, but we also evolve at times when we decide to do what we believe in.”
‘I neither want to be loved nor hated… I just want to do my job…’
As Arnab pursues human stories with great passion and also exposes scams with the same passion, there are sometimes accusations that he is driving a personal agenda. Arnab faces such allegations all the time, besides being told that he is building Times Now on the basis of hype and sensationalism. So what is his reaction to these critics? “They can say what they want. And with the greatest of respect, they can say it as many times as they want. And with as much gusto as they wish to. We believe in what we do. And we are not here to appeal to sections of the media who will judge us. I would much rather be judged by our viewers, and our audiences. So, that kind of criticism is something which frankly doesn’t affect me or my team at all. It’s a function of our viewership as so many people watch us. I am not in a game of adulation. I neither want to be loved nor hated. I just want to do my job. And I feel LalitGate was a damn good job. Now, that was serious investigating reporting. CWG was a damn good job, and Adarsh, Kargil for profit, our coverage of Nirbhaya, and our coverage of the Anna agitation… The openness and passion with which we did it was a damn good job. It’s not my problem that others didn’t do it. It’s not my problem that they followed me. That’s for them to introspect. We stand here, far removed from the corridors of power in Delhi. Setting an agenda which we believe is correct. And the whole world stands up against us, and tells us that we are wrong. I would rather be judged wrong if I have a motive in what we do. But we have no motive but our audience and our viewership. We go with our gut instinct. We play a fair game. So, everyone is free to say what they want,” he declares.
‘I think the time has come for Indian media to take the next step…I am very bullish about this’
So what are some of the things that Arnab feels strongly about in the business of media and advertising, and what would he want to change?
Says Arnab, “The convergence of television and digital is something which excites me. The kind of conversations that we generate on social media excites me… I would like to change the horizons for the news industry… I think the time has come for Indian media to take the next step. I am very bullish about this business, especially television and digital. What I would like to change is the gap that still exists between me and my viewer. I would like to bring the viewer closer to me. Create a system whereby I can talk to them more than I do now, and interact with them more on a daily basis because I find that I get the best perspectives from viewers. So, if there is a way to do that, if technology can be a bridge for that, I would like to look at that.
“For example, we want to amplify our message and see that the kind of conversations we generate during a big news event is tremendous. Recently, somebody from BBC was speaking at an exchange4media event in Delhi, where I was present. He very proudly said, ‘We trend globally once every 3-4 months’. I said, ‘We trend globally every week.’ I don’t think BBC or CNN can dream about the kind of traffic we generate.”
‘On a scale of 1 to 10, I give myself 7…I have done reasonably well…’
Asked to rate his own success on a scale of 1 to 10, Arnab says, “I would put it at 7, because I think I have done reasonably well in the sphere of television. The other 3 are because I have a lot of things to do, which I will do in the rest of my career… I feel I have more years ahead of me than behind me, so I can confidently say that I can’t give myself a 10 on 10. I will be very happy if I give myself a 8 on 10 a year from now.”
It is Arnab’s gut feeling, he says, that 2016, 2017 and 2018 would be three very big years in the field of news. “I believe a lot of things will happen in the television industry. And I think that the passion of the news industry is only beginning to unleash itself now. We have just begun to win the audiences back. People across India have started connecting with news. I see it when a nine-year-old talks to me at an airport or when a 85-year-old lady tells me what she watched on Newshour last night. We are on the cusp of a big revolution in news and I am very excited to be here at this point of time.”
Feedback: srabana@exchange4media.com
