How the Behind-the-Scenes Processes at Times Now Have Led to Embarrassing Debacles

Yesterday, as the Indian cricket team lost to Australia in the semifinal of the 2015 World Cup, the news channel Times Now created the Twitter hashtag #ShamedinSydney in addition to running tickers stating that the "tame" team had "let India down." The channel's ploy quickly backfired as angry people online defended the team and also created the hashtag #ShameOnTimesNow with which they directed their ire at the channel. In our December 2012 issue, Rahul Bhatia profiled the channel's editor-in-chief, Arnab Goswami, and investigated the workings of the channel. In this excerpt from that piece, Bhatia finds that Times Now's obsession with speed has often led to costly mistakes.

Goswami’s visibility at nine every night obscures the fact that his role in Indian news is much greater, and more pervasive, than his fiery pronouncements during The Newshour suggest. “He understands TV more than he understands news,” the output editor said. “He understands what makes for good television.” Under Goswami’s watch, reporters were instructed to thrust microphones at their subjects and demand answers because it made for dynamic television. (Cameramen at Times Now called it “the running away shot”.) “Doorstepping isn’t new, but no one did it in India before,” said Rahul Shivshankar, who served as Goswami’s deputy until 2010.

In a piece published in Outlook last year, Goswami recalled his early days as a television reporter, when he was “thrilled at thrusting my mic into the faces of the who’s who of Indian politics” as they emerged from a courtroom investigating the 1996 Jain hawala scam. “There was something deeply egalitarian and liberating about being able to ask a question,” he wrote. By asking questions, and guiding his reporters to ask questions, Goswami made the questions themselves the main event. “We put mics to people’s faces,” Shivshankar said. “That was not persecuting and hounding. It was soliciting replies from people who were really very evasive because that was the culture in this country. I think that’s changed for the better. I think politicians now know that they need to answer and be more accountable.” The need to be seen asking questions is so ingrained at Times Now that one reporter recently shouted a query at the closed windows of a minister’s passing car, before turning to the camera to explain that the minister had not replied.

Times Now’s visual identity embraced the main philosophy of its editor-in-chief, namely to hold on to viewers, and it quickly co-opted attention-grabbing devices from Hindi news and entertainment channels. “If you saw five windows on Star News, it would appear on our side of the fence very quickly,” the former high-ranking editor said. “Recently, ‘News will be back in 30 seconds’ between news breaks. Or you might have that thing on top [of the screen]: ‘Coming up!’ This is all borrowed from mainstream entertainment and news channels.” 

“I remember our colleagues at Reuters turning in their graves when they used to see or hear some of our packages with all those effects,” the editor said. “We brought in a lot of what was happening in TV soap operas into the way we were treating our stories. We brought in alarmist music and a soundtrack to our reportage.”

Goswami decided cameramen at Times Now would be called video journalists, and he empowered them to make decisions during live events—an inversion of the traditional relationship between reporters and cameramen. “At Times Now, reporters are called sound bite collectors,” a former Mumbai bureau chief said. “If there’s a story happening, video journalists take over.” If a broadcast van was not close by, reporters would leave the scene to deliver footage by hand so the channel’s video journalists could keep filming. 

Times Now had a smaller editorial team than its rivals, and tended to cover fewer events each day; to compensate, Goswami wanted to dominate the agenda on the issues he chose to highlight, and to be fast and first with breaking news. He prized speed, new information, and captivating visuals over explanation and analysis. “He realised that in today’s world, reporters are becoming passé,” the output editor said. “Except for the ones who get you exclusives, the rest are just event reporters—they just stand on location and tell you what’s happening, right? So he’s making them redundant.”

But the channel’s emphasis on reducing “bureaucratic delay” and broadcasting news quickly has come at a cost. “If you have a copy editor involved, it causes a delay,” the bureau chief said. Two reporters said that the channel had few internal filters to prevent errors from going on air.

According to the senior manager, “the obsession with speed” led to a particularly expensive mistake on 10 September 2008. A story about a provident fund scam involving a number of judges unfolded on the network that afternoon and, for approximately 15 seconds, Times Now broadcast the name of one judge, PK Samanta, along with what they believed was a picture of him.

The image was of the wrong man. Justice PB Sawant, who retired from the Supreme Court and now lives in Pune, was alarmed to hear that his face had been flashed on Times Now in connection with the scam. Within five days, Sawant demanded an apology and payment of Rs 500 million in damages. He received neither, though Times Now issued a correction on 23 September. When the channel finally broadcast an apology two days later, Sawant was still dissatisfied, and filed suit against Times Now in a Pune district court, which in April 2009 awarded Sawant Rs 1 billion in damages. (That financial year, Times Now and the other three channels that make up Times Global Broadcasting had an overall income of only Rs 1.47 billion.)

In court, Hector Kenneth, the output desk editor, testified that the mix-up happened because the channel’s image database “inadvertently displayed” the wrong justice. Goswami later told India Today that it was “a computer-generated error that involved no human interface”.

But interviews with three former senior editors and one current senior producer, all of whom were at Times Now when the incident took place, revealed that the mistake was indeed human. As the producer explained: “This happened when the rules were loose at every organisation. There was no footage of the guy, so we said ‘let’s get stills’. Now where are you going to get stills from? Now what happens is, you get on the web and get it off Google. It came from some place like that, off the net. So when you say there’s no human interface, it means the damn search engine didn’t give us the right picture. It’s a nice way of cloaking it.”

The desk editor described an internal system where the demand for instant news clashed with the messy reality of a small and overburdened desk division. “The input guy fucked up,” he said, referring to the reporter who sourced the picture. “But the discretion of the desk is to put the right things on air.”

When I asked the senior producer if any changes had been made as a result of this incident, all he could recall was that Goswami had told the newsroom, “Google journalism is not going to happen here”; the output editor had a similar recollection.  The senior manager, who had blamed the incident on an obsession with speed, said that “the premium on breaking news” meant “the Justice Sawant thing can happen again.”

An excerpt from 'Fast and Furious,' published in The Caravan's December 2012 issue. Read the story in full here.