Barkha Dutt

Barkha Dutt is an award-winning television journalist and columnist from India. She is the host of daily prime-time show The Buck Stops Here. 
She is often criticized for her unscrupulous and dishonest journalism, and fueling religious divide in India, specifically, between Hindu and Muslim communities.

She rose to prominence with the coverage of Kargil Conflict between India and Pakistan in 1999. She is very active on Twitter and has over 5M followers.

Dutt was born on 18 December 1971 in New Delhi, to S. P. Dutt and Prabha Dutt. Her mother, Prabha Dutt, was a journalist with Hindustan Times, an Indian newspaper. Her mother had a deep influence on shaping her journalism career.

Her younger sister, Bahar Dutt is also a journalist, who works with CNN-IBN, an Indian news platform on Television and the web. 

Dutt studied English literature at St. Stephens college in New Delhi. She earned a Master's in Mass Communications from Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi.

She later received a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, New York.

Dutt began her journalism career with NDTV, a popular Television news channel in India.

While working for NDTV, she covered the 1999 Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan. She came in the limelight for her interview with Captain Vikram Batra.

Her reporting of 2002 Gujarat violence, was highly criticized when she frequently identified the attackers as being from either Hindu or Muslim community.

She was accused of sensationalizing the 2008 Mumbai attacks news. It was accused that while reporting from the Taj and Oberoi Trident hotels, where the attacks occurred, she put lives at risk, and even caused deaths of guests by inadvertently identifying on air where they might be located in the hotels. It was accused that to create sensationalism, the Indian news channels, were focused more on the public outrage, than on the terrorists.

In her heavily criticized coverage of the attacks, she showed the positions of the rescue squad outside the buildings under siege on a live telecast. This put at risk the lives of people and the rescue squad.

Saima Beg of Viewpoint stated

Her reporting hampered the commando rescue team and gave away information to the terrorist inside the hotel".

Lydia Polgreen from New York Times reported:

During the attack on Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists in 2008, critics said she and other television reporters were excessively theatrical and melodramatic.

An Indian blogger, Chaitanya Kunte, who blogged her dramatic and reckless coverage of the events, was served a legal notice by her and was forced to take down his blog.

Dutt is often reproached for political and corporate lobbying. This side of her was exposed to the public in November 2010 during the infamous "Radia tapes controversy". The Central Bureau of Investigation stated that they were in possession of 5,851 recordings of telephonic conversations between Nira Radia and senior journalists, politicians, and corporations, in which Radia brokered deals concerning the 2G spectrum sale. Dutt, along with another prominent journalist, Vir Sanghvi, were part of the conversations.

In July 2016, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who is alleged to have played a key role in 2008 Mumbai terror attacks praised Dutt's work in an interview in a Pakistani news channel.

In 2015, Dutt authored a book The Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines (ISBN 978-9382277163). The book received poor reviews on Amazon. Dutt blamed a concerted work by her critics for the poor ratings.