The Zee media conglomerate has sent a legal notice to Cobrapost, and to The Wire, The Quint, and Bhadas4media, reports Exchange4media. The group was reacting to Operation 136, an exposé sting by Cobrapost. In the sting, journalist Pushp Sharma posed as a representative of a sangh parivar group, and offered money to different media groups in exchange for coloring their coverage in favour of pro-Hindutva interests. Many of the individuals Sharma approached, who were being recorded secretly, showed interest. [Read Zee's legal notice, courtesy The Wire] In the legal notice, Zee took the 'doctored video' route, claiming, "a planned conspiracy and a set of self-serving, false, fabricated and baseless piece of writing which in itself is based on tampered, doctored and edited recordings." Zee warned that it would bring both civil and criminal defamation cases (defamation can still be prosecuted as a criminal case in India). Cobrapost and Zee Among all the organizations 'stinged' in Operation 136, Zee has the highest number of videos dedicated to them. In a series of five videos, Sharma meets a series of executives from Zee, and they're all seen showing interest in what he is proposing. In Zee's part of the sting, executives like Gauri Mahapatra, who heads sales and marketing for the Odia Zee Kalinga news channel, are shown displaying interest in Sharma's proposition. The other execs are Purushottam Vaishnava, who has been the CEO of Zee's regional channels since April; and Sagar Arora, Pradip Kumar Sinha, and Abhishek Pandey, who are all…
