Most people had imagined that the Media industry had already fallen as far as they possibly could deep into the abyss of irresponsibility, paid news, propaganda and just blatant lies. However, Shekhar Gupta, the chief of Editors Guild and his ‘news’ portal The Print come as a stench of the rotting soul when they manage to stoop further at every given opportunity. Now, Shekhar Gupta and The Print have managed to blame the Yediyurappa government that was recently sworn in Karnataka for a 6-month-old scandal that broke during the tenure of JDS’ Kumaraswamy and names Congress leaders like Ahmed Patel.
Bengaluru Commissioner Bhaskar Rao is now under the scanner for using power brokers close to the Congress party to get himself a job. The Print has now published the full transcript of the tapes that detail the conversations between Bhaskar Rao and JDS and Congress leaders.
In the entire transcript of the tape, nowhere does the name of BS Yediyurappa or the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) appear. However, that did not stop Shekhar Gupta and The Print from dragging Yediyurappa’s name through the mud.
Yediyurappa’s first scandal…
Karnataka IPS tapes: ‘Ahmed Patel said I will make him commissioner, Revanna will support’
ThePrint’s @Rohini_Swamy brings you the full transcript of the clips: https://t.co/J9qKpBUbjR
— Shekhar Gupta (@ShekharGupta) August 9, 2019
While Tweeting a line from the transcript that said ‘Ahmed Patel said I will make him commissioner, Revanna will support’, Shekhar Gupta, the head of The Print and chief of Editors Guild, goes on to peddle lies and allege that this is the first scandal that has hit the newly sworn-in Yediyurappa government.
The line tweeted by Shekhar Gupta himself mentions senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel who is close to Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi and Revanna, who is the brother of former Karnataka Chief Minister from JDS, HD Kumaraswamy.
The Print story itself starts off by spreading lies and telling its readers that this scandal has turned the heat up on the BJP government in Karnataka.
The story reads:
“Here is the full transcript of the clips, which have also turned up the heat on the new B.S. Yediyurappa-headed BJP government in Karnataka”.
The tapes were recorded six months ago, according to The Print, while the Congress-JDS alliance was still ruling Karnataka. As a summary, The Print says that in these tapes the Commissioner is speaking to a broker named Faraz and the purpose of the conversation was to get appointed. The broker Faraz was purportedly close to Congress. The Print story itself says that Rao was trying to get the appointment through a ‘Congress pull’. He was trying to get picked for the job through Congress because the then Chief Minister Kumaraswamy favoured Alok Verma.
After this summary, The Print magically decides to assert that this entire scandal that involves Congress and JDS and happened 6 months ago while their government was in power is somehow putting the Yediyurappa-headed BJP government in Karnataka on the spot.
What The Print hoped to accomplish was rather simple. People often read the first few sentences of the article or even trust ‘veterans’ like Shekhar Gupta when they tweet an excerpt, even if they peddle lies. By tweeting that this had put the Yediyurappa government in a tight spot, Shekhar Gupta hoped that people would just assume that somewhere buried in that transcript, the BJP government is mentioned and are to eventually be blamed for the entire scandal.
Shekhar Gupta and The Print have often pawned their soul for propaganda and blatant lies. Shekhar Gupta’s ThePrint has a history of scaremongering and spreads fake news to target Narendra Modi government. Addition to that, Shekhar Gupta and his team have also attempted to script their own history by pushing fairytales as facts.
