A full-fledged war has broken out in the electronic media between two rival news channels, with the Bennett Coleman & Co. ltd (BCCl) that owns Times Now TV accusing Arnab Goswami of new television channel Republic TV alleging infringement of Intellectual Property Rights and other charges and the latter dismissing the allegations as “silly” and “incredibly foolish”.
A day after the BCCl lodged a police complaint with the Azad Maidan police station against him and his colleague Prema Sridevi for alleged “theft, misappropriation of property and criminal breach of trust”, an unruffled Arnab said “I was ready for all this... This is a ‘David and Goliath’ battle. Somewhere in my heart, I feel that the audiences are with me. Tomorrow TRP ratings are going to come out. They (BCCl) are doing all this because they have lost the audiences completely. This kind of tactics will not work with us. This will strengthen our resolve.”
“It (the allegations) is such a silly thing. I have been laughing about it since this morning..........Arnab Goswami is sitting in a news room, while Vineet Jain (of BCCl) is sitting in a police station (lodging a complaint against me). Instead, Vineet Jain should spend more time in news room then he will understand what news reporting is all about,” a combative Arnab told The Pioneer in an exclusive conversation on Wednesday evening.
Alluding to the tapes used in the exposes done by Republic TV on lalu Prasad Yadav’s purposed conversation with incarcerated Mohammed Shahabuddin and on the death of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s wife Sunanda Pushkar, Manish Wadkar of BCCl stated in the complaint lodged with the Azad Maidan police station Tuesday “Both these exposes displayed material (in the form of audio tapes of phone conversations) that was procured and accessed while Goswami and Prema were in the employment of Times Now”.