NDTV has once again been caught while trying to spread propaganda on issues of national security.
Last evening, NDTV had published an article with an alarmist headline. “Exclusive: China Has Built Village In Arunachal, Show Satellite Images,” NDTV said. “China has constructed a new village in Arunachal Pradesh, consisting of about 101 homes, show satellite images accessed exclusively by NDTV,” the article claimed.
However, it was soon pointed out that NDTV had deliberately hidden information in its long-standing quest to malign the Modi government. EastMojo, a site that covers issues related to the north east, said that the area had been under Chinese control since 1962.
This was admitted on Twitter by NDTV anchor Vishnu Som, who said that the area had been under Chinese control since 1959. He claimed that the NDTV story had said as much.
However, this was a lie. The only thing that the original NDTV story had said was the area had been seeing “fighting” since 1959. The fact that the area had been under Chinese control since 1959 was completely omitted from the story.
After this glaring omission was pointed out — which changed the whole contours of the piece — NDTV quietly edited its original article to include a line about how the area had been under Chinese control for over 60 years. “Though this area is Indian territory, according to official government maps, it has been in effective Chinese control since 1959,” NDTV’s updated article said.
But by then, the damage had been done. Far-left propaganda pages had already run with NDTV’s story, blaming the Modi government for the construction.
Congress-affiliated Facebook pages also repeated the same lie, claiming China had entered India, having missed the NDTV update that China had already been in that area for 60 years.
And to top it all, Rahul Gandhi repeated the same lie today morning, not realizing that his own great-grandfather had presided over the country when China had occupied that territory.
This is now becoming a pattern in how the left spreads fake news — a leftist portal publishes a fake story, or a story with a crucial detail left out. Propaganda pages then run with it, taking it to the masses through jokes and memes. And then politicians share it to their millions of followers. By the time the publication updates its story, the falsehood has gone half-way around the world.
And NDTV has often spread similar news of this nature. This was pointed out by the Press Information Bureau most recently, when it had written a stern letter to Ravish Kumar for airing fake news about the government’s paddy procurement. Kumar had then written a long-winded apology on his Facebook page. But less than a week later, NDTV is back to its old ways, and continuing to lie with impunity.
