On October 8, The Wire carried an exclusive report centred on Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah’s son Jay Shah that caused a major furore in the political circles of the national capital. The story alleged a “dramatic increase” in some of Jay Shah’s businesses “since Narendra Modi became prime minister”. While this prompted a press conference by Congress leader Kapil Sibal and Union Minister of Railways and Coal Piyush Goyal, it didn’t receive much play on television news. Neither did any of the Big Media organisations follow-up on the details mentioned in the story. One exception to this, though, was NDTV that followed-up on The Wire’s story with its own investigation into Shah’s company filings. The piece headlined “4,000% Increase In Loans To Jay Shah: Cronyism Or Deserving?” has now been pulled down. The web story authored by journalist Sreenivasan Jain took off from his show, Reality Check, on the same issue, titled: “Loans to Jay Shah: Cronyism of Business As Usual?”. Curiously, the Reality Check episode is still up on the website, while the web report based on it was pulled down. We reached out to NDTV Editorial Director Sonia Singh and Jain to know why that was so and were told that “NDTV online has tweeted a response”.

The story presumably should be back up once the ‘legal vetting’ is done. Usually, though, a report is legally vetted before a story is published.

This is not the first time that NDTV has pulled down a story. In October 2015, it took down journalist Nitin Gokhale’s interview with former Navy Chief Admiral DK Joshi. Without mincing any words, Joshi had stated in the interview that the media gave into sensationalism while reporting on issues, including the Sindhurakshak mishap. As examples, he talked about a newspaper that “invented the coup theory” and followed it by saying “…this reporter was a darling of the foreign vendors, and to show his importance he would author articles like the reporter is in country abc at the invitation of xyz”. Back then Singh had said the interview was pulled down following a “complaint regarding potential defamatory content”.