On Tuesday (March 7), on the occasion of Holi, a man identified as Mohammad Shabbir in Telangana set his ‘friend’ identified as Anjaiah on fire just because the latter threw colours on him. ‘The News Minute,’ like various media houses, reported the horrific crime but there was a stark difference.
The digital news platform worded their article carefully in order to justify the man’s rage for attacking his friend. But, when enraged Twitter users pointed out the impudence, the news agency discreetly changed the text of the report.
As I said, this was terrible even by #TNMurasoli standards. So @dhanyarajendran quietly deletes the tweet and @thenewsminute quietly changes the text with no clarification that the text has been changed. And then dhanya will preach about media ethics.https://t.co/g1peMRIC1j https://t.co/jg9aTn6kfa
— Sai (@Saiarav) March 10, 2023
The Twitter user also pointed out that Dhanya Rajendran, the editor-in-chief of The News Minute, had also tweeted about the matter, but had later deleted her tweet following the online outrage over the organisation’s justification of Shabbir’s act of violence against his friend.
Notably, the report by The News Minute report was published on March 9, two days after the horrific incident took place where a Hindu man was mercilessly set on fire by one Mohammed Shabbir for simply applying colours on him. The headline of the report read, “Upset at being smeared with colour, a man allegedly sets friend ablaze in Telangana.”
To begin with, The News Minute justified the perpetrator in the headline itself, implying that it was the victim’s fault that he spread colour on him.
The media house, however, was not finished here. It even went so far as to write in the report’s body how Shabbir felt “insulted and disrespected,” because of which, he committed the crime.
The bias of TNM while reporting the incident was very visible to the people online, and quickly got highlighted. Twitter users outraged over the matter, after which, the media house quietly changed the text of the article.
As can be seen above, in the updated version of the report, the news website has quietly deleted the two adjectives it had used to justify the horrific crime perpetuated by Mohammad Shabbir.
This is a standard operating procedure for most liberal media outlets. In order to hide Muslim perpetrators, media organisations frequently turn to deception, either withholding comprehensive facts or cutting out the criminals’ identity entirely, or rationalising or toning down the crime by making it appear as if the perpetrator was coerced to commit the crime. OpIndia has several reports on how these leftist media houses work overtime to “give a ‘Hindu spin’ to crimes committed by Muslims”. We even reported how these self-proclaimed ‘secular media’ houses even use featured images of Hindu rituals and Hindu words/symbols to whitewash Islamists even when the crime involves non Hindus.
