Sudhir Chaudhary, editor-in-chief of DD News, once asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi where he gets his energy from. On a recent episode of Decode, broadcast on a government-owned channel, he had thoughts on the “OG Godi media”.

His evidence for this claim? A 2016 interview in which a reporter asked Sonia Gandhi about her relationship with mother-in-law Indira Gandhi, and a 2014 clip on NDTV of a journalist asking Rahul Gandhi how his samosa and jalebi tasted. Chaudhary milked it for all it was worth, calling these journalists the “OG Godi media” and insisting that Prime Minister Modi, unlike his predecessors, faces “all sorts of questions” from the Indian press.

The irony is staggering. By most reasonable assessments, Chaudhary is among Godi media’s most prominent practitioners.

In January 2018, Chaudhary, then editor-in-chief of Zee News, sat down with PM Modi for a one-hour sitdown interview. Among the highlights: “You live like a fakir... At this age, how do you have so much energy? Because at this age, no one else can even imagine it. Today, your energy is such that a young Indian would be ashamed.” In May 2019, days before the general election, Chaudhary secured another interview with Modi, warmly noting that the opposition had been dreaming of Modi packing his bags.

This is the context for Chaudhary’s attack on Umashankar Singh, the ex-NDTV journalist whose “samosa-jalebi” clip he cited on his show. 

On X, Singh came out with a blistering attack on Chaudhary. But on the clip itself, Singh noted that the clip was captioned “light-hearted moments of politics” and came from coverage in which he was pressing Rahul Gandhi on an alleged scam. 

What Chaudhary also chose not to mention is that Singh was doing what TV journalists in the field call ‘tic-tac’ – an informal, on-the-go questioning of politicians as they move through public events. It was not a sit-down interview.

Chaudhary, by contrast, was granted a formal interview with the Prime Minister and still couldn’t find a harder question than where Modi gets his energy from.

For good measure, Chaudhary also invoked the spectre of foreign forces claiming that entities which “do not wish to see India progress” are fabricating a narrative about Modi’s flaws, portraying India’s democracy as fragile and its press as unfree. He even called a “28-year-old journalist in Norway” (Helle Lyng) a participant in this campaign. 

The rebuttal he offered was that Modi has given 150 to 200 interviews to international outlets, therefore, claims of a restricted press are a “blatant lie”. 

Modi recently courted criticism for not taking questions from journalists in Oslo, one of the stops on his recent five-nation tour. Helle Lyng, a 28-year-old Norwegian journalist, publicly called out his decision not to take questions. But it was a familiar pattern: Modi has never taken questions at a press conference in India during his tenure as prime minister.

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