Razdan quit as prime anchor of NDTV news network in June saying she was taking an offer to be professor of journalism at Harvard.
A former executive editor of NDTV 24×7 news channel, Nidhi Razdan, on Friday revealed through a Twitter post that she had fallen victim to a “serious phishing attack” and realized that what she thought was a teaching offer at Harvard University was fake. Razdan announced in June that she would be quitting her NDTV job and joining Harvard University as an Associate Professor of Journalism.
In her statement posted on Twitter, Razdan said: “I had been given to believe that I would be joining the University in September 2020. While I was making preparations to take up my new assignment in January 2021. Along with these delays, I began noticing a number of administrative anomalies in the process being described to me.” She further added that the perpetrators of the attack used clever forgeries and misrepresentations to access her personal data and communication and even might have gained access to her email and social media accounts.
Razdan stated that she has filed a police complaint and provided them with several items of documentary evidence. She stated that he has written to the Harvard University authorities to take the matter seriously.
In her tweet, Razdan mentioned that she wrote to individuals and organizations with whom she has been in touch over the past few months to keep them informed of this “shocking development.” She also said: “I hope that the police are able to get to the bottom of this attack on me at the earliest and help me bring this unsavoury incident to a swift end.”
Joshua Benton, a journalist and Director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, responded to Razdan’s tweet and stated that “Harvard has no school of journalism, no department of journalism and no professors of journalism.” He added there is Nieman Foundation at Harvard but no faculty or classes in it and Shorenstein Center but no journalism-specific faculty.
One of the best-known anchors in recent years, and known for her relentless criticism of the current Modi government, Razdan had been the anchor of the English channel NDTV 24×7 for 21 years, as host of several shows including the news debate show “Left, Right & Centre” and the weekly debate show “The Big Fight.” She is also the author of Left, Right and Centre: The Idea of India (2017).
