Zakka Jacob will step away from his position as Managing Editor of CNN-News18. Rahul Shivshankar of ‘Mr McAdams’ fame will lead things at the channel, assuming the position of Editorial Affairs Director, according to an internal email sent to Network 18 employees. 

Jacob will transition to the role of Senior Anchor and Group Foreign Affairs Editor, a position the channel in an internal email said is “in the grade of Managing Editor”. 

In an email to employees at Network 18, chief content officer Santosh Menon said: “Zakka has been expressing his desire for some weeks now to step back from managerial responsibilities and focus on his journalistic craft.”  

Highlighting Shivshankar’s elevation to Editorial Affairs Director, Santosh spoke of him as “an archetypal journalist” with a “track record of having led many TV newsrooms with aplomb”, adding that “all teams in CNN-News18 will report to him”. Both Jacob and Shivshankar will start their respective roles on Monday, according to the email. 

Misinformation, communal dog whistling and bloopers

For someone considered by his channel to be “voraciously curious, highly energetic and widely read”, Rahul Shivshankar has had his share of bloopers and peddling misinformation. He is also a repeat offender when it comes to giving news a communal spin.

During the recent Delhi blasts, he put out his patented “RAW DISPATCH” while sitting at his CNN News18 desk, claiming that “terror has a religion” – a coded way of implying that a particular religious community is responsible for terrorism without saying it outright. 

In October 2024, Shivshankar falsely put out a post on X claiming that Samajwadi Party MLA Mehboob Ali said Muslims would end BJP rule during a speech in Bijnor, according to Alt News. The video played on the broadcast was found to be cropped. 

According to Alt News, “In the full, uncropped video of his speech, one can see that Ali did not say that the Muslim population was increasing. Instead, he attributed this claim to the Right Wing, without naming a party, accusing them of using the narrative to scare the public.”

Alt News has also fact-checked Rahul Shivshankar on multiple occasions during his tenure at Times Now.

On one occasion during primetime, he highlighted a Facebook Live video and broadcast it on national television as a “secret” chat between Left-wing activists, falsely implying that Umar Khalid is aligned with the Popular Front of India (PFI), a banned entity, according to Alt News. After the Alt News expose in September 2020, the channel took down its broadcast. 

In another instance, Times Now broadcast archival images of a PLA cemetery, falsely presenting them as graves of Chinese soldiers killed in the 2020 Galwan Valley clashes with Indian troops. With Shivshankar on air during his show India Upfront, the channel claimed, “Photos of 106 PLA tombstones reveal [the] extent of Chinese casualties in [the] June 15 Galwan clash,” according to Alt News. 

Hilariously, though, Shivshankar fell for a fake WhatsApp forward listing the names of 30 dead Chinese soldiers during the Galwan clashes. He was on air with Navika Kumar at the time. In the end, Kumar even said, “Even this list put out by Global Times could be a fake forward.”

In August 2018, Shivshankar started a primetime debate on the Kerala floods, stating, “Viewers, we begin with a story of devastation, the pictures that you are going to see on your screens in just about 30 seconds are pictures of deluged districts of Kerala.” 

That footage showed a house collapsing in West Bengal, not Kerala, according to Alt News.