Hyderabad: Under the current crisis that has seized the nation, not only pressure is on political people but also on the media to polarize the environment to align it with or the other ideology said Television journalist and anchor Barkha Dutt.
As a journalist, one should be willing to engage with all kinds of opinion as there is a lot more to just one dimension of the story she said addressing the FICCI Ladies Organisation on ‘Changing nature of Indian Media’ on Tuesday.
“I am a free thinker and I don’t subscribe to any dogma. One need not be an Arnab Goswami or Arundhati Roy. There is a middle path between these extremes,” she said.
She added individuals today are given the opportunity to provide better content with Journalists having their own personal brands but the real challenge is the polarized environment in this fast-changing technology.
“Never before the charge of bias was used so casually because viewers and audience already with a view were looking for confirmation bias,” she said.
When asked to comment about the reality of the ongoing protest at Shahen bagh against the unconstitutional CAA and proposed NRC, Barkha said she found it quite extraordinary as there had never been such mass mobilisation of Muslim women, some women are 90-years-old, carrying the tricolour.
It created a moral pressure on the government, but now, it is becoming politicized with BJP making it an election issue, she averred.
On the likely outcome of Delhi election, Ms. Dutt said she did not wish to get into number crunching but “my gut feeling is Delhi will go with the trend of people voting differently for State elections and national elections”.