Taking a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent interviews through email, Shiv Sena’s mouthpiece Saamana congratulated the prime minister for taking a “short-cut” route and resorting to one-way communication.
In an editorial called “Puffed Interview”, the piece criticised the lack of communication between the prime minister and the press, asking why the PM has not been giving face-to-face interviews.
The piece also claimed that the route taken by the PM by giving email interviews is an 'amazing' new method of journalism.
Terming the interview propaganda, the piece read, “Such an interview can be called a ‘campaign’ or a ‘propaganda’. Such interviews are done in communist democracies like China and Russia. This is a form of one-way communication.”
Alleging that the PM is deflecting the questions of countrymen, the piece read, “The citizens of the country have some questions too. The man who calls himself the ‘Pradhan Sevak’ needs to answer those and many other questions too. However, a “short-cut” was chosen by giving interviews via e-mail.”
“PM Modi has begun a new era of journalism by giving a sham of an interview via e-mail. If this continues, many journalists will be left unemployed and it will be on the PM to provide them with new jobs,” the piece remarked.
Disapproving of the methods used by the Modi government to communicate with the press, Saamana’s piece mentioned that the PM has not held any press conference in the past four years of his tenure. “He talks via ‘Mann ki Baat’ and the media houses publish it. This does not suit his personality,” the piece read, adding that Modi was a friend of the media before he became the prime minister but later, however, he constructed walls around himself.
The editorial piece by Saamana comes a day after Modi gave an exclusive interview to news agency ANI and discussed topics such as concerns around rising unemployment, the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the Goods and Services Tax (GST), women empowerment, the end of his party’s alliance with the PDP, future of the Mahagathbandhan and India-Pakistan relations among several other things.
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