Find someone who loves you like The Print loves the Congress party.
Several hours after the Congress had itself admitted that at least one part of the leaked toolkit was genuine, The Print has gone ahead and published a lengthy article trying to prove it’s fake. “Why tech experts think BJP’s Sambit Patra’s claim about Congress toolkit could be fake,” The Print headlined its piece, trying to put its sleuthing cap on,
The gist of The Print’s argument seemed to center around a screenshot Sambit Patra had shared, which showed that the creator of the toolkit was one Saumya Varma. “Two cyber experts said that the first screenshot shared by Patra was fake. According to them, the file properties of the alleged toolkit as seen in the screenshot are inauthentic, with some technical elements missing in the description,” The Print wrote in its article.
The Print then quoted “researchers” who said that the screenshot didn’t look genuine. “The screenshot shared by Patra “appears to be inconsistent with the genuine Mac OS window for properties of a document received via WhatsApp,” the article quoted an expert, incidentally from the far-left Ashoka University, as saying. Another “researcher” told The Print that the screenshot appeared to be “mimicking a message box that would appear on the Mac OS.”
Now this would have been some pretty clever detective work, but there was a problem — the Congress had already admitted that Saumya Gupta had written the document several hours prior. “Let’s be clear We made a research note on Central Vista for the party It’s genuine & fact-based….Patra is showing metadata/author of a real document,” Congress MP Rajeev Gowda, who Saumya Varma works under, had tweeted at 11:23 am today.
Congress social media head Rohan Gupta had also admitted that one part of the toolkit was real, and written by Saumya Varma.
Congress’ contention, though, is that while Saumya Varma had indeed written the toolkit on the Central Vista, the BJP had allegedly added other pages to the real toolkit. But the screenshot shared by Patra was for the Central Vista part, which showed that its author was Saumya Varma. So the Congress, in effect, had said that the screenshot shared by Patra which showed Varma as the author author was real, but the pages that he claimed were a part of the toolkit were not.
But such was The Print’s desperation to defend the Congress that it went ahead and conducted an investigation on a screenshot whose validity wasn’t even in question, and conveniently determined it was fake. Hilariously, The Print published its article around 8 pm, several hours after the Congress had implicitly admitted that the screenshot was indeed real. But this isn’t particularly surprising — such is the slavish devotion of Lutyens media journalists to the Congress party that they’re willing to try and prove allegations against the party as fake, when even the Congress itself admits they’re true.
