How to mislead your readers: Lessons from News18

Your favourite news portal might churn out Fake News
Photo: Internet Search

In the last couple of years we have seen an exponential rise in usage of the term, “Fake News”. The term got traction, shortly before the US elections and has been used widely ever since. The term was coined in response to so called news reports, claiming actions and events, which never happened. But is that all Fake News is about? If a news report claims that the sun has risen in the west today, it will obviously be a fake news. But what about news reports, which uses data, first person accounts, field visits and other credible means to publish a report, yet it doesn’t give you the true picture? Can this “fact based” news still be called Fake News?

Indian Affair came across this news report from New18. Filed by Adrija Bose, the news talks about a very sensitive topic, that of human trafficking. Now before I talk more about the news report, it is worthwhile to know that almost all headlines for a news report are written by a special desk and not by the reporter filing the story. The idea is to write a catchy headline, which will get more clicks. This is known as “click bait”.

The headline reads, “It's So Common For Haryana's Men to Buy and Sell Wives That No One Cares anymore”. Now a headline like this should send shivers down our spines. Because buying and selling wives has become common in Haryana. When one uses the word, “common”, for an activity, it implies that a vast majority of people practice that. One can say, “smoking is common among men in India”. Common things can be observed by everyone. They don’t need an “investigative reporter” to go out and collect data. The headline will make us believe that a vast majority of the 25.3 million people in Haryana practice wife buying and selling.

But wait, isn’t buying and selling wives illegal, let alone inhuman? Why isn’t anyone talking about it? What are the opposition parties doing in Haryana? If a vast majority is involved in buying and selling of wives, there would have been a national outrage. Victims would have come forward and their buyers/sellers would have been hounded by the media. Clearly the claim by New18 is a case of exaggeration, bordering on Fake News.

The news also claims that the state has a sex ratio of 834, i.e. 834 women for every 1,000 men. I have no idea where this number is coming from. The census of 2011 counted 877 women per 1,000 men, a significant increase from 2001 census, of 861. So in the very beginning of the “news report”, two major lies have been used. Dispensing wrong or misleading information is also Fake News.

After a sweeping generalisation in the headline, the “news report”, for no apparent reason, shifts its focus to Mewat. The district of Mewat in Haryana is the most backward district of India. With a decadal population growth of 38% (state average of 20%), it has the highest population growth rates in the state, except for Gurgaon due to migration. This is primarily to a significantly high fertility rate in the district. Against the state average of 2.7, Mewat has a fertility rate of 5. Surprisingly the claim of an abysmal sex ratio as the reason for the “common practice of wife buying and selling”, also turns out to be suspicious. The district of Mewat has a sex ratio of 906 (against the state average of 877), the highest in the state. The district also has the lowest literacy rates in Haryana. Only 73% men in the district are literate against the state average of 85% and an abysmally low 38% women are literate, against the state average of 67%.

Adrija Bose, managed to talk to four trafficked women in the district, all married/sold to Muslim families. This is not surprising given that Mewat’s 79% population is Muslim. It is only natural that statistically they will be higher in any parameter. Surprisingly, in the “news report”, Adrija does not provide us the numbers for trafficked women even for a single village. While she claims that the practice is “common” yet she could only come up with just four women in the entire district. One can understand that it is difficult to find out trafficked victims, let alone talk to them. But when something is “common”, it should have been possible for Adrija to talk to more than four women in a district with over 1 million people.

Later on in the “news report”, Adrija encounters a shocking truth. She says, “The shocking part is that everyone here is aware that 'Paros' [a term used for trafficked women] are bought from different parts of the country because of the lack of women in their state, that they are often shared among the brothers in a family, and that they are sold to other villagers. But no one bats an eyelid.” She goes on to extrapolate her personal opinion, as a problem of the entire state. She clearly failed her statistics exam, if she ever took one.

Finally Adrija quotes, Ghausia Khan, a local activist, where she reveals the source of the problem. “The 59-year-old activist may be the only light in all of Mewat district, but she has not been able to stop the practice. "I have tried, but I can't do this alone. Men who are old, alcoholic, violent, or widowed don't find wives in Haryana. So they go to other states to find wives," she said.” So the so called “common” practice of buying and selling wives is restricted to a particular category of men in Mewat. Apparently it is not even “common” in Mewat, let alone Haryana.

The problem of trafficked women being sold to men in Mewat and their subsequent commoditisation, seems to be a local problem. This is an alarming situation. While Muslim women in rest of the country are fighting against Triple Talaq and Nikah Halala, the trafficked women in Mewat are not even given their basic right to a legal marriage. It will be futile to engage with the local Maulvis to solve this problem. They, in all probability are indifferent to the crime. There is a need for more women like Ghausia Khan, who will fight the battle for their fellow Muslim women.

The problem with ill researched reports is that they appear to be true when someone reads them. The reader will only get to see the truth once they start doing their own research. In this particular “news report” Adrija would have spoken to people in the Mewat region, but she extrapolates her “findings” to the entire state and to all of North India. She then absurdly goes on to claim that, “Though the practice of buying wives is common in the northern part of India, it's especially popular in Haryana.” One wonders, what her yardstick to measure what common or popular is? Such sweeping statements not only diminish the credibility of news and the journalist, it also trivialises a very sensitive issue. 

Haryana has become some kind of a punching bag for reporters who want to cover “patriarchy” and other social issues. There are many problems in Haryana, including patriarchy and others. But these problems exist in almost all states, in varying degrees. But Haryana is almost on the top when it comes to “news reports” on such subjects. It is probably due to the fact that a journalist can simply ask their office driver to take them to the nearest patriarchy infested village. And being surrounded on three sides by Haryana, the probability and convenience of landing up in a Haryana village is extremely high. As a famous journalist once sighted the “tyranny of distance” as an excuse to not cover the Assam riots, it is the ease of access for the likes of Adrija Bose. One can do a day trip to a Haryana village and file an extrapolated report the next day. It is that easy.

Lal Kiley ka tender

The Mandi House area in the Lutyen’s Delhi is particularly busy on weekends. The miniscule minority, which identifies itself as theatre lovers, descends on the three public auditoriums to get their fill of art and culture. On rare occasions one might get to watch an engaging, high quality production. On other occasions one has to make do with either Taj Mahal ka tender or Gadhey ki barat. Taj Mahal ka tender, a satire, is what came to my mind when opinions and comments on Red Fort started pouring in on my social media timelines. The Dalmia Bharat Group has adopted the Red Fort under the government’s Adopt a Heritage initiative, which requires spending on public infrastructure and no profit making. The adoption was widely covered in the media, sometimes with misleading headlines like, “are Marwaris taking over our national heritage?”

I can really do with some upkeep

As expected, the rent an outrage section of “intellectuals” started twisting the story. They were “appalled” and “heartbroken” because the Red Fort has been “auctioned”.  Even the wannabe comedy rag ScoopWhoop compiled all the outrage in an image heavy post, full of lies. At this point AltNews should have picked up the fake stories on Red Fort auction and set the record straight. Oh! But wait, AltNews is only interested in what the liberals consider to be fake. Since the liberals themselves were howling to “save” the Red Fort, AltNews perhaps gave this fake story a miss.

So what is the story behind the so called auction of Red Fort? The government in 2017 decided to do something about the abysmal standards of public services provided at our national monuments. Lack of proper signage, toilets, clean drinking water, sitting spaces, etc. steal the joy of visiting our heritage. In an attempt to improve the facilities, which the government obviously failed to deliver on its own, the Ministry of Tourism decided to invite private participation.

The Ministry’s demands were assessed by a Standing Committee of the Parliament. The committee was headed by none other than Shri Derek O’ Brien, Member of Parliament, Trinamool Congress. Others prominent members in the committee (31 members) were former aviation minister Praful Patel, former minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, Shailja Kumar, former CPM member Ritabrata Banerjee and former RJD MP Pappu Yadav.

The Committee after deliberations made its recommendations on March 1, 2018. The report can be read here. Paragraph 112 on page 48, of the report says, “The Committee notes that the initiative of Adopt a Heritage is a welcome step on the part of the Ministry of Tourism.” The parties, whose members signed on the report are now spreading fake news, telling people how the government is selling off national monuments. Foremost being Shri O’ Brien himself.

The fact is that there is no sell off of any monument. The guidelines of the Adopt a Heritage scheme can be read here. The prime focus of the scheme is to rope in a private agency, which according to the report can be an NGO, individual or a company, to build, operate and maintain public facilities. The organisation will not be involved in any restoration work of the monument, neither will it “own” the monument.

All the outrage among the liberals, as usual, is not motivated by facts but by feelings. And facts don’t matter when their agenda is only to criticise the government. As long as they can create hysteria by peddling their lies, it serves their agenda. Then there is the gullible janta, which eats out of their hands and exponentially spreads their lies, without any fact check.

A casteist and bigoted opinion piece in The Wire

We live in a society where hatred has taken over facts, especially in the media. Tuning into a news channel at nine would either mean bleeding ears or shamelessly biased anchors peddling their ideology masquerading as “honest opinion”. The poor quality reporting of print media forced me to stop buying a newspaper five years ago. I now borrow newspapers from friends, only to clean window panes and mirrors. Switching to online news at least lets one read the news for free. One can also customise what one wants to read. Life becomes a bit simpler. In the last few years we saw another form of “journalism” taking roots. The kinds which is present only online. This makes sense, since the future of news now lies in a smartphone and not in an LED TV.

Our wires are in bit of a tangle

The three names which comes to my mind are Scroll, The Wire and The Print. All three claim to be unbiased, but even a high school kid can tell which way they lean. Every story they put up can be summarised in one line, “I hate Modi and BJP”. There is nothing wrong in hating Modi or BJP. It is impossible that every citizen of India would love them. But the point here is that these are not just random Indian citizens. These are “reputed” media houses, run by “respectable” senior journalists and they have a responsibility, that of honest journalism. What happens when these platforms start dishing out Fake News? The Scroll fake stories can be read here and here. The Print fake story can be read here. And we all remember the Fake story run by The Wire on Amit Shah’s son, which was later pulled down by the website. Even mainstream media published Fake News, the case of The Hindu can be read here.  

The three online publications mentioned above, use not just real life incidents to write their fake stories but also use convoluted social issues to establish a narrative that is hatred in the least and a mechanism to paint an entire community in negative colour at best. Take this story by Nilanjana Bhowmick on The Wire. The headline reads, “Militant Hinduism and the Reincarnation of Hanuman”. The headlines are usually not written by the contributor. They are written by others to make them provocative and or interesting, primarily to click bait readers. In the story Ms Bhowmick narrates her “ordeal” in Noida. She of course gives us an alleged conversation with her driver. The driver seems to be the favourite pick for journalists to concoct stories.

@ProfVarshney extent of political marginalisation especially. An auto driver there told me "growth is real but for others not for me"

— barkha dutt (@BDUTT) December 15, 2012

Ironically have Rajasthan rajput driver in Gujarat. Says padmavati will be 'mast" film and Karni sena is bakwaas. The lessons of travel.

— Saba Naqvi (@_sabanaqvi) December 2, 2017

She starts with the description of what she believe to be a militant Hindu event, the Hanuman Jayanti procession in Noida. Her scary description is supported by a “seven second” long video where a random guy with a sword is leaning out of the window, amidst traffic. She probably has never witnessed a Sikh procession where people with saffron turbans march with swords and Kripans. The way Ms. Bhowmick reacted is how people react when they have been brought up in a protected environment, away from reality. But Hanuman Jayanti and the militancy of that single blade of sword was a mere tool, to grind her axe. She immediately jumps on to the RSS and gets disturbed by their weekend march in Khaki gear. She claims, “These visuals are a disturbing assertion of a resurrection of the RSS and the Bajrang Dal, and an indicator of how in the last few years militant Hinduism has grown roots in India.” One wonders, how walking on streets symbolises militant Hinduism. Please tell me if you get to understand this analogy.

Ms. Bhowmick is infact alarmed by the fact that RSS has members in some “up scale” sectors of Noida. She is worried about the “proliferation of Hindu extremism” in the apartment blocks of Noida. According to her people of Noida should behave the way Ms. Bhowmick prefers them to behave. She is after all the neo Brahmin, who wants to control everyone else. She is also outraged by the sudden increase in wealth of the local Gurjar community. She says, “Locally known as Gujjar boys, they sit on the pile of money their parents made from land acquisition. Their days are spent body building in gymnasiums or akharas.” Is Ms. Bhowmik trying to say that the local Gurjar community is nothing but a bunch of Hindu extremists? Is she painting an entire caste as militants? Or is she simply suffering from the Savarna superiority complex, which makes her uncomfortable when the peasants get rich?

Her absolute hatred to the Gurjar community becomes clear when she writes, “They have the most expensive smartphones, designer clothes, swanky cars, and more money than they know what to do with. What they do not have is proper education.” As if her piece full of hatred, bigotry and casteist slurs was not enough, she ends it with,” Noida is the new India. And the enormous success of Hindutva groups here is a warning that we will do well to pay heed to. And soon.” An alarming warning to instil fear in the readers’ minds.

It is OK to hate the RSS and the Bajrang Dal, it is Ms. Bhowmick’s right. But what is dangerous is to concoct stories using a mythical conversation with an imaginary driver to instil fear. To malign an entire community only because they now have money. To call an entire religion militant or extremist, without giving a single piece of statistic. Ms. Bhowmick and The Wire could have saved bandwidth by simply writing, “I hate RSS and Gurjars”. We live in a society where hatred has taken over facts, especially in the media.

Cambridge Analytica and the hysteria around it

Will you be ware next time?

No matter how intelligent, advanced or evolved humans become, we are all gullible, at some stage. More than being gullible, we as a species are extremely lazy, even when it comes to thinking. We simply do not want to think. We want that job to be done by someone else. Over the past week, an otherwise little known company, Cambridge Analytica (CA) has made headlines across the world. The company, in its marketing and promotion material has claimed to have influenced election results across the world, particularly in getting Trump elected as the president.

The CA wild fire was sure to reach India and it did earlier this week. The whistle blower, Christopher Wylie, claimed that the Congress and the JD(U) had engaged CA to carry out research during elections. Some reports claim that CA thorough its Indian arm was also helping the BJP. After the information started to come in on involvement of Indian political parties with CA and its Indian arm, news rooms have become high pressure volcanoes. Arnab Goswami is trending #CongSmokingGun and Times Now is busy with #DataChorDossier. NDTV reluctantly managed to tweet once on CA leaks in the past six hours. But what exactly are people outraging over?

Broadly there are two aspects of the CA leaks. One, data from Facebook users was illegally harvested and two, the data was used to “influence” voters. This is the case in US. In India CA has been active since 2003. This report mentions its assignments in India from 2003 to 2012.

In 2003 SCL, CA’s India arm carried out a “Psephological study and opinion poll” for a national party to identify swing voters in Madhya Pradesh. In the same year, in Rajasthan, SCL did an internal (party audit) and external survey for a political party to understand voter behaviour.

In 2007 a political party in UP got a party audit and a census of politically active individuals through in-depth interviews. In the same year SCL carried out a research communication campaign for countering Islamist radicalisation in six states.

In 2009 general elections SCL managed the campaigns of many candidates using their “proprietary data collection methodologies” for successful campaigns.

In 2010 they carried out a detailed research programme, in Bihar, targeting 75% of the households to identify caste and its corresponding message.

In 2011 and 2012 SCL carried out research to understand caste and its dynamics to leverage it during elections.

Internal party audits should be least of our worries. What we should look at is the work done by SCL outside the party offices. Primarily it falls into the category of field work. What I think happened was something like this - A kind of caste census was done by SCL to tag a house with a caste. Together with other information like household income, number of family members, etc. campaigns were structured and targeted messaging was done to relate to the voters. I do not think Facebook would have played a major role in identifying caste of people. And such data collection drives are not unique. They are routinely done by almost all major parties, across the country. Most of the data is anyway available in the Census reports.

Why don't you buy a ticket to
Krabi? Or Siem Reap?

The other area where Facebook data was used to “influence” voters in US, is of grave concern. The data of 50 million Facebook users was used to send them targeted ads and posts based on their psychological profile. Now this may seem scary, but we have all, at some point in time witnessed such an attempt. Let me give you an example. I was looking up for flights to Krabi and Siem Reap over the past two days. During my research for this article I came across the page of The Hindu and viola, there was an ad from Yatra, selling me flights to Krabi and Siem Reap. This is exactly what CA did, only the other way around. They profiled people and sent pro Trump ads/posts to swing voters or anti Trump voters. There would never be enough proof to suggest that such campaigns actually work.

Our online presence has always been monitored by the likes of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, Amazon, Flipkart, Makemytrip, Twitter, etc. Our browsing history, purchase patterns, online reading behaviour is all known to these tech giants. They might not know our names, but they know our IP. What CA did is nothing new. Only they put the data to influence voting decisions by sending them customised campaign ads or posts. Some people might get outraged by this act. But then let us see what the political parties have done traditionally to “influence” voters. Parties have promised laptops, TVs, free internet and electricity, religious trips and so on. The migration from, in your face bribery to more subtle online messaging is perhaps the natural course a political party will take. Especially when the young voters are getting most of their content from internet, rather than from news rooms.

Targeted messaging or posts or content is the backbone of social media. Once you start watching too many Indian folk songs on YouTube, it will start recommending you similar content after a couple of hours. Your home screen will be customised based on your watchlist. Similarly if you start reading or start responding to or start retweeting too many anti Modi tweets, Twitter will start suggesting you anti Modi handles to follow. It will be the same if you start reading anti Congress tweets, only then you will be sent anti Congress handles. What people are getting hysterical about, has been happening for a very long time. CA got into a spot only because they used illegally obtained data, not because they tried to “influence” voters.

We should not feed the hysteria, especially on social media. You never know who might be profiling you. What has to be done is to understand what is happening and demand rules that would protect us from future data thefts. India doesn’t even have a data protection law. Most of the popular social media sites do not have their servers in India and hence are not governed by Indian laws, whatever little there is.

What we also need to do is to be careful when we click on that “quiz” or the cool “game” on Facebook or download that fun “app” next time.  These are usually the way by which data is mined. But then one can never really be very careful with such things. We all have that one stupid friend on our list, who would click on anything that flashes.

No one is interested in farmer welfare

The farmers in Maharashtra are protesting against the BJP government. News reports suggest that there are approximately 30,000 of them on streets in Suburban Mumbai, ready to enter the city by Sunday evening. They are demanding a complete loan waiver, better minimum support price as recommended by the Swaminthan Committee report, no “forceful” acquisition of farm land in name of development and in a few cases transfer of forest land that the farmers have been tilling for many decades now. The news reports can be read here, here and here. In case you want to read a melodramatic, fiction style version of the protest, you can read it on The Wire. Though the protests started much earlier, the media gave it attention only after the protesters landed at the gates of Mumbai.

We gave you a sickle and a hammer for 21st century farming.
What else do you need?

Now that we know what the farmers want, we should also know who is organising the protest march. The farming community in India is too fragmented and diversified to have same concerns and hence is not unified. The present movement is being organised under the umbrella of the Akhil Bhartiya Kisan Sabhi (ABKS), the peasant front of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The same CPI(M), which was handed a resounding defeat in Tripura last week. The protesting farmers can be seen with the CPI(M) flags and caps, marching ahead towards Mumbai. The CPI(M) and its extended arms in trade unions have all the right to protest, take out processions and give speeches. We thankfully, live in a democracy and not some Communist dictatorship.

If there are genuine concerns about the agrarian situation in India and a union is using democratic means to highlight the concerns, then no one should have the problem. But then there are problems. What the protesters are demanding is nothing new. A blanket waiver of farm loans has been demanded and handed over in the past. The UPA government in 2008, did that. It awarded a loan waiver of ₹60,000 crore to small and marginal farmers. But guess what, within a few years the farmers were demanding yet another loan waiver and the governments started handing them out. The loan waiver had clearly not helped the farmers much.

The problem of farmers is not loans or their waiver by the government. Their problem can be summed up in just one word, “inefficiency”. And no one is willing to talk about it. Neither the union or state governments nor the self-appointed saviour of farmers, the CPI(M). The inefficiency that is pulling the farmers and the country down can be measured by comparing the agricultural sectors of India and China. Despite having less arable land, China produced far more per unit of land than India does. Irrigation, transportation, storage, pricing, etc. are all making farming an unviable occupation. If the system is kept inefficient the farmers will keep protesting and the governments will keep waiving the loans off.  

The agrarian distress has become a political tool to create hysteria. The CPI(M) and others of their strip use it to highlight how Capitalism is killing the farmers and hence generate support among the poor and the so called intellectuals. The others use it to either pull the opposition down or to appear magnanimous by announcing ruinous loan waivers. Not a single political party has ever come up with a comprehensive plan to improve the farm sector in India. And surprisingly the things that can fix the problems do not require out of this world innovation.

Here are a few things that can bring efficiency in the farming sector and relieve the farmers from their economic stress.

Irrigation is the most crucial aspect of farming. Farmers spend money on sinking tube wells and then on pumping water out of it. A vast majority of the farmers depend on ground water and monsoon for irrigation. Both are unreliable. The water table on one hand is depleting at alarming levels and the Monsoon is not getting stronger. The alternate is finding frugal solutions. For millennia, the Indians have been using water harvesting to meet their domestic and agricultural needs. Revive the ponds, lakes, tanks, reservoirs that were used to store rain water and to recharge the ground water.

Cooperatives – India has witnessed success stories in cooperative movement. Amul being a highly successful model. Since the vast majority of farmers are marginal farmers with small land holdings, their produce can easily be pooled into a cooperative and they can be paid the right price without having to travel to the mandis with their meagre crop and non-existent bargaining power.

Middlemen – Remove them. Too many fruit and vegetable markets in India are controlled by middlemen who decide on prices and what to be bought. The eye watering prices of onions are not a result of a poor crop, but that of hoarding by the middlemen. The farmers should be given direct access to the markets where they can openly sell their products, to whoever they want to.

Logistics – The concept of farm logistics is non-existent in India. The Food Corporation of India does a shoddy job at storing and distributing its stock of food grains. It is time that it is privatised with a clear tariff structure. Thousands of tonnes of grains is wasted every year thanks to the lack of infrastructure.

Minimum Support Price (MP) – Phase it out. There is no point incentivising farmers to produce a certain type of crop. The market forces are strong enough to create the demand. Many farmers grow certain crops in hope of getting the MSP. The government ends up with a huge stock, which eventually gets wasted. On top of that not all farmers get to sell their crops to the government. Once the MSP is phased out, the farmers will grow what they think will fetch them the right price.

Information – This point is linked to the cooperative framework, where farmers will be given information on what the different crops can fetch them. For example, growing celery or lettuce might be a better proposition, in some geographies, than growing tomatoes.

Value addition – The farming communities can be trained to add value to their products by processing them. Tomatoes can be sundried, squashed, pulped or turned into ketchup. Processing fruits and vegetable not only increases their shelf life but also fetches more money per unit. And one doesn’t really need capital intensive manufacturing plants for such jobs.

Land acquisition – This is probably the toughest part to handle. Various governments have tried many different approaches to handle this monster of a task. Nothing seems to have pleased everyone. Nothing probably will. The most common grievance of farmers, whose land gets acquired, is that what do they do with the money when their livelihood is being taken away. This is true. The unskilled farmers do not have an option to seek employment in the organised sector. The compensation, no matter how large, eventually runs out and they end up working on other peoples’ farms. A way to ensure regular income to the farmers can be to put part of their compensation into an annuity scheme. This will ensure a regular monthly income and leave them with some cash to use.

Skill them – We have to be honest with ourselves. Farming is no longer a sector people want to be in. It is far too labour intensive in India and gives pathetic returns. The time has come when children of farmers should be given the option of training in other trades where they can seek employment if they so wish to.

There are many other ways that can drastically change the way Indian farmers live and earn their livelihood. Sadly no one is willing to push for those changes. The CPI(M) is happy mobilising 30,000 farmers to Mumbai for a loan waiver but will never ever seek technological changes for the farmers. For if the farmers cease to be poor their politics of poverty will become irrelevant. The others are not interested in improving the lives of the farmers because they are too fragmented on caste lines to be counted as a voting block.

Unless the government has a vision to improve the lives of farmers by using technology and market access, the farmers will be used by both the CPI(M) and the others as political tools. Their lives will not improve, food wastage will continue and they will keep protesting.