narendar modi has been a target of two congress to left leaning channels. last time when the vidhan sabha elections happened in gujarat both ndtv and cnn-ibn ran a campaign against the modi one had to see ndtv to believe it how they had made it a point to carry at least one story against him each day and iirc then they had clocked some 150(+) reports against him with in a span of around 45-60days and similarly cnn-ibn had done something like 80odd reports against the individual. there were not even 5% reports that talked about the exceptionally good work modi had done in the state of gujarat, since all these reports were based on the godhra riots. those 45-60days yellow journalism by these two channels against him was at its worst, it was a literal character assassination. when that interview happened or for that matter when the news came that he had walked off the interview then i was surprised as to why would he even go and give and interview to all these channels who had no liking for him, but as it turned out the agenda of karan thapar was only to target him on the gujarat riots which pissed him off and he left the studios. interestingly post the election results these two channels starting dubbing it as polarisation which won him the election but interestingly there was a decent chunk of muslim voters who had voted for him as well. the main reason he won was because he has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of gujaratis of which muslim community is a significant part, and if there was any polarisation then partly the blame had to be shared by these 2 leading channels and majorly by sonia gandhi who touched the lowest when she termed modi as “maut ka saudagar”, where she had the audacity to defend a terrorist.
the heights of all this, recently there was a meet of over seas gujaratis, NRIs, POIs, indian corporates and MNCs in gujarat where modi was able to extract a commitment of around 250b usd investments which is massive by any standards but this was hardly covered by the 2 channels. one can just judge the bias these 2 channels have against him.
on the contrary the same is not true about the times group in general of which times now is a part, they have interviewed him, there has been no attempt by them to do his character assassination, but where ever need be he has been snubbed but they have never gone over board with doing it, and where ever he has to be given credit for the good work he has been given national prominence and so he has been always comfortable dealing with them and so you see interview done by times now.