According to PTI feed story, one Umesh alias Lakku Nagar was arrested yesterday from his house in Dankaur area of Gautam Buddh Nagar district and booked under Indian Penal Code sections 307 (attempt to murder), 452 (house-trespass), 147, 148 and 149 — all three related to multiple people rioting with deadly armed weapons. He has been accused of entering the house of a Hindu Yuva Vahini functionary, Naveen Pandit, brandishing a pistol and threatening to kill him.
The story further cites SHO (Station House Officer) who says that Pandit had objected to a vulgar dance show and a qawwali programme during the Drona fair held in the district last week. Following that, Lukka Nagar called up Pandit and abused him and he also made derogatory remarks against Yogi Adityanath. While the audio clip had gone viral on 7th September and police had registered a non-cognizable report.
However, on Sunday night, Lukka Nagar along with his four aides reached the house of Pandit brandishing a pistol and threatened to kill him. An FIR against Lukka Nagar was filed on basis of a complaint by Pandit and the arrests were made on Monday morning.
Lukka was arrested for threatening Pandit with a gun under relevant sections of the IPC. However, the PTI story spinned it to show that he was arrested for ‘abusing Yogi’.
The PTI story was also picked up by NDTV, Hindustan Times and The Hindu which ran with the same headline. Times Now ran the story with the headline ‘UP police arrest man for passing ‘derogatory’ comments at Yogi Adityanath’ which is also misleading.
PTI or Press Trust of India is a news agency and exchanges information with several other news agencies including 100 news agencies based outside India, such as Associated Press, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and The New York Times. Publication houses subscribe to the agencies like PTI, ANI, etc. for a fee, and use the feed stories where their own reporter could not be present. Usually, the agency stories are published as it is by the publication houses unedited, thereby keeping the responsibility of authenticity of the story on an agency such as PTI. The media houses above could have chosen to edit the headline to give a true reflection of the story, but they chose not to, thereby being complicit in pushing fake news.
This is not the first time PTI has shared misleading news. Earlier, PTI had almost maliciously spread a completely false report about the Yogi government drastically slashing its education budget in Uttar Pradesh, while the truth was that it had actually seen an increase.
Last year, PTI was slammed for circulating 2015 photograph of Chennai Airport as that of Ahmedabad airport during the incessant rains. Later PTI was caught peddling fake news yet again, when it claimed that the Government had now made Aadhaar mandatory for registration of death with effect from October 1, 2017. CBEC, Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia have on separate incidents claimed PTI of misquoting them, whereas MHA had also denied PTI report claiming Doval attended election meeting at Rajnath Singh’s house.
