Earlier today, NDTV was called out in the social media for being Pakistan’s mouthpiece. Pakistan’s ruling party PTI had used a video clip from NDTV to peddle their anti-India propaganda.
For all those in New Delhi living in the delusion that Kashmir is happy over the scrapping of Article 370, union of J&K territory, an old Kashmiri has a msg:
“Lift the curfew for a day and we’ll let them know how happy we [Kashmiris] are”.
Can Modi do that?#SaveKashmirFromModi pic.twitter.com/qJZZpTcmN7— PTI (@PTIofficial) August 8, 2019
Imran Khan’s PTI had used a clip from Sreenivasan Jain’s show on NDTV where an NDTV journalist reporting from Srinagar had claimed that he had met an old, blind man in Srinagar who was allegedly told him, “New Delhi is saying everybody in Kashmir is happy about making Jammu and Kashmir a UT. Let them lift the curfew and they will know how happy we are”. The show had not shown the so-called old man.
NDTV’s anti-India stand has been known to everyone for a while and the channel was slammed on social media for acting as Pakistan’s mouthpiece after the PTI tweet was shared widely.
Pakistan’s love for NDTV is not new and many NDTV anchors, present and former, have found praises from our enemy nation in the past.
After wide social media outrage, NDTV decided to come up with a clarification statement. They claimed that Pakistan has done something that NDTV does usually, taken quotes and statements out of context, and distorted its meaning.
They also claimed that Pakistan has ‘distorted Indian media coverage’ by ‘maliciously editing together different excerpts’ and ‘taking quotes out of context.
However, even in their clarification, NDTV managed to tell lies. The video clip that Pakistan’s PTI had shared was not edited by ‘piecing together different excerpts’. It was a continuous section taken from the show titled ‘Reality Check’ that was aired by NDTV and uploaded by them on YouTube yesterday.
The clip shared bt Pakistan’s PTI appears at 5.00 minutes in the 25-minute video on NDTV’s YouTube channel. The clip shared by Imran Khan’s party is a continuous section 28 seconds long and there is no ‘editing together different excerpts’. PTI’s tweet quotes the alleged statement by this nameless old man exactly as the NDTV reporter says it. So it is not clear what exactly is NDTV calling a ‘distortion’ and quoting out of context.
Actually, NDTV has basically blamed Imran Khan’s PTI for doing things they themselves have been doing with news. NDTV has been caught several times spreading blatant fake news and misleading people with quotes taken out of context and distortion of facts.
It is notable here that despite being endorsed by Imran Khan’s party. NDTV did not muster the courage to name PTI in their clarification tweet. Neither did they say that Khan’s party has misused one of their reports. Instead, they went with generalisations like ‘Indian media coverage’.
It is also interesting that after airing show after show where they are trying desperately hard to peddle the narrative that Pakistan has been peddling, despite the fact that the state has been converted into a Union Territory and its people given all the rights that every other citizen of India enjoys, NDTV ironically adds the platitude that it believes ‘Kashmir is an integral part of India and India’s internal matter’.
