About five minutes into yesterday’s Frankly Speaking, in which Times Now‘s Arnab Goswami ‘interviewed’ Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it seemed like Goswami would ask for a selfie with Modi any moment now, and thus complete the fanboy-meets-idol routine that was playing out on our television sets. Whether or not Goswami got Modi’s autograph and a selfie remains undisclosed, but there are a few things that became patently obvious thanks to Frankly Speaking. One is that if Goswami was a Lego character, he’d be Good Cop/Bad Cop. While we usually see Bad Cop when Goswami is on his tremendously popular show, The Newshour, on Frankly Speaking, we got a look at Goswami’s inner Good Cop.

Throughout the interview yesterday, Goswami was polite, deferential, smiling and entirely non-confrontational. In response to Goswami’s first question, Modi offered a rambling answer that was 486 words long (yes, we counted) and Goswami didn’t interrupt him. It wasn’t just unsettling because we were now imagining something like this happening to Goswami’s Bad Cop before he got the much-coveted interview with the Prime Minister — imagine The Newshour without Goswami’s antics. Nahiiiin! — but because this edition of Frankly Speaking was proof that press freedom is dying a slow death in plain sight.

No one was expecting Goswami to be the Harold Larwood to Modi’s Bill Woodfull and leave the Prime Minister bodylined and battered, but Goswami’s questions were so adoring and wide-eyed that the programme may as well have been rechristened ‘Frankly Fawning’. Just take a look at how many times he thanked Modi within the first three minutes of the interview. Goswami’s opening comment was, “Prime Minister Modi thank you very much for this interview. Thank you very much.” He then said that this was the first time a sitting prime minister was giving an interview to a private television news channel and so thanked Modi again: “So I would first like to thank you and am very grateful for the opportunity.” Possibly because just Goswami’s gratitude isn’t enough, a few seconds later Goswami said, “I am very grateful and our viewers will be very grateful also Mr Modi, because they want to hear your views on a range of subjects.”

This gratitude, which appeared to have the same consistency as drool, glistened from each and every question that Goswami didn’t ask as much gush. Prefacing a query about Modi’s foreign policy, Goswami said, “The amount of personal interest you have shown in foreign policy, probably none of the previous Prime Ministers showed the same kind of interest. Your approach is pro active.” He may or may not have fluttered his eyelashes while saying this. When Modi said (in response to the question on foreign policy), “For 30 years, in our country, the government was unstable”, Goswami didn’t interject or even raise an eyebrow. “The world didn’t know me,” said our Prime Minister and Goswami agreed by saying “You were an unknown entity in foreign policy”. Neither seemed concerned by the minor detail that even if the world didn’t know Modi, it did know of India’s existence.

When the conversation turned to the economy, Goswami offered questions that were just an incoherent jumble of words, like this one: “If we see the theme running through these schemes, is your social agenda at the core of your personal economic philosophy, social transformation?” It’s tempting to look at that and try to find an underlying wickedness— for example, what really is the Prime Minister’s “social agenda” and what exactly is this “social transformation”? — but Goswami lapped up the vacuous answers Modi gave him and didn’t even try to pin him down. Instead, he gushed about how the perception is that there is no corruption in this administration because Modi has kept “a very tight control on the reins of government”.

There must have been Doordarshan and Akashvani officials who watched yesterday’s Frankly Speaking and smirked at the sight of Goswami, badgerer of panellists and the man who roars the questions that the Nation wants to ask, sitting meekly and towing the line laid down by Modi. Later at night, DD News showed clips of the interview, carrying the credit “Courtesy: Times Now“, which was a complete reversal from the old days when state media was the one who did the softball interviews and private news channels were the ones who carried the clips, giving credit to state media. The private news channels were supposed to be watchdogs to the tail-wagging puppy that was the state media. If the recent interviews by the likes of Goswami and Karan Thapar are any indication, then Indian big media’s tails wag as much as Doordarshan’s.

Right at the beginning of Frankly Speaking, Modi said, “The world of the media has grown so big that everybody has to attach themselves with it.” On the face of it, he seemed to be providing a justification for not turning to Doordarshan when it was time to speak to the nation via an interview. It seemed to be an acknowledgement of how “big” non-state media has become in India. Yet what we saw yesterday was proof of dependence upon the political establishment. Evidently, at least some (if not all) private news channels are happy to become the chosen megaphones for the government — it means access and that access becomes security. After all, if this sort of censorship can be enforced at the state level, then who would want to risk the ire of the Centre? Add to this the competition from other channels along with the fear of being blacklisted, and virtually every high profile interview we see is an exercise in pandering to celebrity, whether it’s politician, a minister, a cricketer or an actor.

Two years ago, in another episode of Frankly Speaking, Goswami had interviewed Modi when he was Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial candidate. At the time, no one knew just what kind of a majority BJP would get, but everyone was certain that there was a “Modi wave”. Goswami would have known that he was sitting in front of the man who would in all probability become the next prime minister of India. Guess what he opened with? A handshake and a question about whether Modi approved of the election campaigning being “so bitter, so negative and so confrontational”?

Goswami’s next set of questions pinned Modi down on using caste as a election plank without Goswami ever raising his voice. “Do you believe that Priyanka Gandhi was making a reference to your caste?” he asked directly at one point. Modi replied that he’d studied in Gujarati and that was what guided his understanding of Gandhi’s comment. It was a cop-out, and Goswami didn’t need to thump the table or crow for us to get that point.

It wasn’t as though Goswami didn’t give Modi a platform to put across his slogans and messages in that old episode of Frankly Speaking. All of these were delivered efficiently by the soon-to-be prime minister. But Goswami also ensured he included questions that Modi would struggle to answer, questions that needed to be asked of BJP’s campaign and policies. Modi’s standard refrain in the interview was “main hairaan hoon” (“I’m agitated”) and to repeatedly attack the media for not giving “factual information” to its viewers. Well-behaved as Goswami was, the interview was a combat with both Goswami and Modi sizing up and attacking one another.

Two years later, Goswami and Modi were sitting across from each other, being filmed in slightly soft focus, and giggling coyly.

The contrast between that old interview and the one we saw yesterday is astounding. It’s the same interviewer and the same interviewee, yet that’s where the similarity ends. Goswami didn’t raise any uncomfortable subjects — like Dadri, the opposition from students across the country to the current administration’s policies and its appointees, the Ishrat Jahan case, the Vyapam scam, and concerns about the influence of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) over the government. When he asked a question about rising unemployment, Goswami literally struggled to finish his sentence. His question about Subramnian Swamy’s attacks on Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian was so vague and carefully nameless that Modi came across sounding direct even though the Prime Minister didn’t actually name Swamy or say that any action was being contemplated against Swamy. Everyone rejoiced that Swamy’s knuckles had been rapped; no one wondered about why Modi didn’t say all that he did on Times Now to Swamy instead of Goswami. Are the lines of communication within the BJP so bad that the Prime Minister has to do a public interview to be heard by a member of his own party?

Getting an interview with the Prime Minister, particularly one who heads up a regime that isn’t particularly welcoming of the press in general, is a coup. Full marks to Goswami for managing that. However, it’s worth asking at what cost he’s scored this interview. How much of our independence as journalists are we willing to give up in exchange for an interview that will lay bare how much under the establishment’s thumb our big media is? Evidently, Goswami and Times Now’s ratings make it an attractive platform for the Prime Minister, but surely there are warning bells we should ring when a private news channel effective replaces state media?

Watching Modi and Goswami yesterday, there was one phrase from an old Simon and Garfunkel song that came to mind.

And all the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they’d made
And the sign flashed its warning
In the words that it was forming…

It’s an ominous detail that the song is titled “The Sounds of Silence”.