Television journalist and anchor Barkha Dutt has said there is tendency to put pressure on media, not only on “political people”, in the present highly-polarised environment to align with one ideology or the other.

Sometimes, there may be only one position to take depending on an issue, but as journalists, one should be willing to engage with all kinds of opinions as there is more than one dimension to a story, she said. “I am a free thinker and I don’t subscribe to any dogma. One need not be an Arnab Goswami or Arundhati Roy. There is a middle path between these extremes,” she said.

Ms. Dutt was here to address the FICCI Ladies Organisation on ‘Changing nature of Indian Media’ here on Tuesday and interacted with mediapersons.

Today’s fast changing technology, the journalist said, has given a huge opportunity to those interested in providing better content and journalists have their own personal brand but the challenge is the polarised environment. “Never before the charge of bias was used so casually because viewers and audience already with a view were looking for confirmation bias,” she added.

Asked about the reality of Shaheen Bagh protests in Delhi against CAA and NRC, she said she found it quite extraordinary as there had never been such mass mobilisation of Muslim women, some of them 90-years-old, carrying the tricolour. It created a moral pressure on the government, but now, it is becoming politicised with BJP making it an election issue, she averred.

She said NRC could weaponise the CAA and that the problem was not fast-tracking the citizenship of those persecuted in their countries but for putting a religious filter to it.

On the likely outcome of Delhi election, Ms. Dutt said she did not wish to get into number crunching but “my gut feeling is Delhi will go with the trend of people voting differently for State elections and national elections”.