'Nobody owns the owner': Book reveals how NDTV, Star India called it quits

The author recounts how disagreements between NDTV and Star India's ad sales team triggered a split between the two in this exclusive excerpt

Murdoch is a news buff. The political and social context of a country and how its news industry operates is one of his favourite topics of conversation. Whenever he travels to any News Corp office around the world, he seeks out editors working for the group and asks them questions around news, society and politics. Uday Shankar, chairman, Star and Disney India, and president APAC, direct-to-consumer and international, The Walt Disney Company, was the CEO for Star News from 2004 to 2007. On one of Murdoch’s trips to India in 2005, Shankar took him around the newsroom. ‘He asked me questions out of curiosity. In one hour he would have asked hundreds of questions. My memory of him was, “What an incredibly inquisitive man!”,’ laughs Shankar. In most markets where News Corp had a news presence — Australia, the US, the UK — the rules were clear. In India, they were not. In print, foreign firms had been grudgingly allowed 26 per cent foreign investment in 2002, but the ground rules for news broadcasting were not specified. It was against this backdrop that the differences between Star and NDTV began.

Photo: Amazon.in

‘Although he [Murdoch] financed the channel [Star News] he had no hesitation in giving us total editorial control,’ says Prannoy Roy in an essay he wrote in a book commemorating twenty-five years of NDTV*. ‘The relationship between Star and NDTV was very hands-off. NDTV always had the upper hand. I have no idea what the formal agreement between both the parties was but they used NDTV mikes in reportage [while the channel was Star News] and didn’t change even after we protested. You could say they built their brand on the back of Star,’ says Dilshad Master-Kumar, senior vice president, operations and programming, Star News. The NDTV-programmed Star News’s coverage of the Gujarat riots in 2002 is, in fact, counted amongst the most fearless in the business. It also raised hackles in several quarters including the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party at that time. It brought private news broadcasters firmly on the government’s radar. Roy has written in the NDTV book about getting calls to tone down the reportage. This editorial freedom given to an outside programmer was the cause of constant skirmishes between the editorial team at NDTV and the ad sales team at Star India.

Roy and his team brooked no suggestion or attempt to try and change a story or a report they were doing. This rankled for several reasons, the biggest being that Star had paid NDTV an advance (to buy the equipment) plus a fixed fee with a built-in 15 per cent escalation clause. The amount spent in the first year was reportedly $10 million (just over Rs 39 crore). By March 2002 the fee NDTV got amounted to Rs 70 crore (about $14.6 million). Though Star News made an estimated Rs 50 crore ($10 million) in revenues by then, it wasn’t profitable. NDTV had no skin in the revenue game. It probably didn’t care. But rising year-on-year targets meant the Star team was straining at the leash, wanting some say in shows or content.

Prannoy Roy and his team at NDTV

With about a year of the five-year contract (1998–2003) left to run, [Peter] Mukerjea [CEO of Star India] was wondering what to do about this. Star could go with NDTV as it was, or it could find a new firm to replace NDTV, or it could run a news channel itself. It explored various options of entering into a joint venture with NDTV. But they couldn’t agree on the right to appoint the editor-in-chief of the channel. Roy refused to give up any editorial control. It was while this discussion was going on that something happened to help Mukerjea make up his mind.

Gulbarg society during Godhra riots in Gujarat

In a meeting with a major textile company, which was also an advertiser, Mukerjea faced a piquant question. The chairman and managing director of the Indian textile group had a bone to pick on a news report that had run on Star News. It was about environmental issues in a town where they operated. They insisted that the report was one-sided; the reporter had not taken the firm’s views into account. How could a channel that claimed to be unbiased allow this? Mukerjea explained that he had no control over editorial matters. The chief of the textile firm asked him a basic question: who was paying whom? When Mukerjea explained that NDTV was paid an annual fee by Star, he just looked at Mukerjea and said paternally, ‘Malik ka koi malik nahi hota [nobody owns the owner].’ For him, the channel was owned by Murdoch and Star was responsible.

This was probably the last straw. It hit Mukerjea that whether or not Star had editorial control, to everyone outside it was culpable if something went wrong. He conveyed his apprehensions to James. There had already been a fracas over the Nikki Tonight episode in 1995. ‘Editorial independence’ then became the deal-breaker in the second round of negotiations. ‘Earlier, they [Star TV] had agreed to let NDTV continue to have editorial control. It was on that basis that we agreed to start discussions on continuing/renewing the contract. However, in December 2001, Star TV suddenly changed its mind and said it wanted editorial control. It was then that we decided to break with Star because we believed that NDTV as an Indian company should retain full editorial control,’ Roy told me in an email interview later in 2003.

Star decided to do its own news channel. And NDTV started planning two news channels — one in Hindi (NDTV India) and the other in English (NDTV 24X7). Their break-up was amicable according to both firms. However, it had repercussions that went far beyond the launch of a few new channels.

Excerpted with permission

*Ayesha Kagal, ed., More News is Good News: Untold Stories from 25 Years of Television News (Noida: HarperCollins, 2016)