First job is putting the house in order: Prasar Bharati CEO

New Delhi: With the controversy surrounding Doordarshan’s Narendra Modi interview refusing to die down, Prasar Bharati CEO Jawhar Sircar today said the issue related to the autonomy of the public broadcaster is in the public domain, and added that he and his team had been trying to put the house in order for the past two years. [caption id=“attachment_646327” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Doordarshan logo in this file photo. Image from Wikimedia.[/caption] “Our job is to put our house in order first, which the board and my team are trying so hard for nearly two years,” Sircar told PTI when asked about the steps Prasar Bharati is planning take in the wake of the controversy. Prasar Bharati supervises the functioning of Doordarshan and All India Radio. “Regarding autonomy, the issue is in public domain now and we have correspondence on each issue, with refusals, on record,” he said. DD had on 26 April interviewed BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Modi at Gandhinagar and then telecast it the next day. However, remarks made by Modi on Priyanka Gandhi and his claims of proximity with senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel were edited out by DD, but became public through the social media, triggering a row. Sircar had himself written a letter to Prasar Bharati board members, saying that following the interview questions had been raised about the “impartiality” of the public broadcaster. DD News which had telecast the interview had however maintained that “there was no deliberate editing or omission of any portion of the interview”. “Wherever editing was done was for technical reasons and during post production. There was no interference or control from any authority in the entire process,” it had said in a statement. PTI