At a time when the IQ levels of self-proclaimed liberal progressive journalists are under serious questioning due to the often bizarre stands displayed by them, a journalist has claimed that Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf is the ‘official’ news agency of India.
Raju Narisetti, the Director and Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Journalism School, New York, has mistaken the ruling political party in Pakistan for an Indian news agency, that too the ‘official’ news agency.
Narisetti, who has spent a long career in journalism working for various media houses like Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and many others, looked at a tweet from the official Twitter handle of Pakistan’s ruling political party and thought that it has come from the Press Trust of India, which he further claimed is India’s ‘official’ news agency.
Yesterday, Pakistan’s ruling party PTI had tweeted saying “Freedom of expression is the beauty of democracy but expressing the enemy’s stance is not freedom of speech but treason against its people”.
Narisetti was quick to conclude that the PTI there (despite the display image of the handle being the logo of the Pakistani political party) is the press Trust of India, hinting that press freedom in India is now in a slippery slope.
Twitter users were quick to slam the knee-jerk tweet.
this happens when your primary instinct is to run down India at the drop of a hat.. Handle to theek se check kar leta bhai.. https://t.co/rEXAlZ3ytS
— Keh Ke Peheno (@coolfunnytshirt) July 17, 2019
Politician Omar Abdullah and Nidhi Razdhan of NDTV, who has done a fair share of fake news peddling herself, also corrected Narisetti. They also pointed it out to him that PTI is not an ‘official’ Indian news agency.
Raju Narisetti has literally spent an entire career in the media and journalism industry. A career journalist like him making such an error and jumping to sly-hint a so-called ‘slippery slope of press freedom’ only displays that it is often the journalists themselves who are on a ‘slippery slope’ due to their prejudice and biases, not the press freedom in our country.
