A week after NDTV took down a story on loans given to Jay Shah, the channel's managing editor Sreenivasan Jain, who also co-authored the piece, has called it "deeply unfortunate". He said, in a Facebook statement, that the channel's lawyers had taken it down for "legal vetting" but had not restored it even after a week.
"This is deeply unfortunate, since the report is based entirely on facts in the public domain and makes no unsubstantiated or unwarranted assertions," wrote Jain. "A situation like this presents journalists with hard choices. For now, I am treating this is as a distressing aberration and have decided to continue to do the journalism that I have always done – on NDTV. All of this has been conveyed to NDTV."
An earlier NDTV report on Jay Shah's loans is being legally vetted.
— NDTV (@ndtv) October 12, 2017
At the time, Jain had expected that the article would be "temporarily" taken down.
Jain's reporting on Shah's companies followed an investigative report on The Wire that appeared to link Shah's economic fortunes to his father--Bharatiya Janata Party's president Amit Shah's--political ascent.
Meanwhile, The Wire's editors said in a press statement that a special civil suit filed by Jay Shah's lawyers showed that "no single factual error has been substantively shown or pleaded against The Wire".
"No case of untruth has been made out against The Wire," according to the statement. "Indeed, the plaint acknowledges that the full text of the lawyer's exchange with The Wire was available on the website on the date of filing the suit, which is shown as October 12, 2017."
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