Its about Arnab Goswami

Love him or Hate him, you can't ignore him. Arnab Goswami has a mastered the art of creating sensation and playing to the gallery.

It is a fact that most people like to take sides to various issues and very few people actually understand nuanced discussions. He understands this fact very well and takes sides in each and every discussion he conducts. He loves to corner his panellists on issues he feels the majority will side with his views and arguments. He does not believe in nuanced and unbiased discussions even though the channel may claim to be so.

Arnab must have taken cue from Fox News, the US based news channel which even though takes up sides and puts up their own biased views on each and every issue, is a very successful and popular channel. This kind of reporting and conducting discussion/talk shows also happens in a lot of Hindi news channels and other vernacular language news channels. The only difference is that the English speaking, urban and 'elitist' Indian people who think of themselves as very intelligent and knowledgeable have not seen such behaviour in the other Indian English news channels.

The impact Arnab has created by his way of reporting can be seen in the way channels like Headlines Today (Rahul Kanwal) and 9X News conducts their prime time shows (telecast during the 9PM to 10PM time slots). They have started emulating Arnab. The only exceptions being NDTV and CNN IBN who have consciously tried to maintain a different or rather their original identities. But even these channels can be seen to telecast such discussion/talk shows with either their Editor-in-chief's (CNN-IBN’s Rajdeep Dardesai) or their top draw reporters/journalists (NDTV’s Barkha Dutt) during the same time slots as Arnab's Newshour.

Apart from that this field (journalism) has become very competitive with new channels coming up every now and then to cover the same news. They have to create their own identities and brands to grab more eyeballs and stay on top of the others. I believe we should at least congratulate Arnab Goswami that has become very successful in creating his own brand (an easy pointer would be one of the Flipkart ads where politicians are shown discussing the topic of online shopping in a talk show the host of which acts, talks and behaves the way Arnab does).

In the world of Media you can know if you are popular or not by the amount of discussion people are having about you. It does not matter whether they are discussing your merits or your demerits. Like they say there is no such thing called bad publicity, all publicity is good.