The News Minute | February 27, 2015 | 3.58 pm IST
The latest person to join in the debate over Arnab Goswami and a boycott of Times Now by civil rights activists is Congress MP Shashi Tharoor.
Referring to the Editor-in-chief of Times Now Arnab Goswami as “Mr. Unspeakable”, Tharoor asks whether one could demand responsibility from the irresponsible.
Tharoor tweeted: Open letter to Mr Unspeakable: "avoid broadcasting content that is malicious, biased, regressive, knowingly inaccurate, hurtful, misleading"
Later added that his tweet was about an open letter sent by civil rights activists to Arnab Goswami.
Tharoor has been critical of Times Now for quite sometime, after the channel's consistent reporting on his wife Sunanda Tharoor's murder probe. Some media-watchers have criticized the channel of resorting to a vicious campaign against Tharoor.
In a letter dated February 24, but released on Thursday, seven human rights and civil rights activists wrote an open letter to Goswami, stating that they would for the present “stay away” from debates on Times Now.
They said that the news channel had on several occasions violated norms set out by the National Broadcasting Authority. The signatories said that in two recent debates on the channel that concerned Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai’s treatment by the government, certain activists were called “anti-national” and unpatriotic. They took “serious exception” to the use of such words repeatedly on the show by certain panelists as they amounted to “hate speech” and “abuse”.
As the editor and host of the show, they said that it was Goswami’s “duty” to rein in panelists when crossed certain lines and conduct the entire debate in a reasonable manner.