Court restrains channel from airing content after damage is done.
A Telugu news channel on Friday aired the video footage of an elderly man in a sexual encounter with three women, throwing Andhra Pradesh into a tizzy. The channel, which had advertised extensively about the video earlier, claimed that the person in the CD was governor ND Tiwari, 86.
The video was taken off the air after a court injunction.
Soon after the video was aired, women’s groups protested in front of the governor’s residence on Friday. While the People’s Organisation for Women (POW) demanded his ouster, Telugu Desam chief N Chandrababu Naidu sought an immediate inquiry into the event and also demanded the governor’s recall.
The footage aired by the channel ABN Andhra Jyoti showed an elderly man, in bed with three middle-aged women, all without clothes. The man in the visuals, however, had a cloth covering the upper half of the body up to the neck.
A pre-show publicity ad of the channel, which is part of a media house that also owns a newspaper, said that it would be disclosing “lustful activities in Raj Bhavan”. It went on to describe the person as “a freedom fighter…, a senior Congress man, a person wearing a shining Gandhi cap…, and whose speeches present the age-old value system” before declaring him to be none other than the governor.
After reading this, the viewers were glued to the channel. The governor’s office approached the courts to restrain the channel from showing the visuals.
By the time the court intervened and issued injunction orders, the visuals had been aired for nearly one hour. Shell-shocked with the narration and the visuals, viewers were disappointed when the channel pulled out the visuals.
The channel management, too, was trying to approach the court for a vacation of the injunction orders. With the courts remaining closed due to Christmas, the channel staff apparently tried to approach the chief justice at his residence. Till late on Friday, the channel was waiting for a vacation of the orders.
According to sources, a woman named Radhika approached the channel with the CDs.
While Radhika alleged that she had been providing women to Raj Bhavan for the last one month, she said it was done only after they were provided jobs and she a mining lease.
“She approached us through a common contact. We decided to air the visuals after talking to Radhika,” a senior functionary of the channel told
DNA.
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