swatkats
Skilled
Several media houses were prepared to enter into a ‘cash for coverage’ deal with an undercover reporter posing as a representative of an organisation promoting Hindutva for electoral purposes, investigative portal cobrapost.com revealed at a crowded press conference here on Monday.
As part of its investigation, Cobrapost surreptitiously filmed the interaction its reporter had over several months with top executives at dozens of leading newspapers and television channels across north India. The reporter, Pushp Sharma, assumed the identity of ‘Acharya Atal’ from the ‘Srimad Bhagvat Gita Prachar Samiti’. At various times he would refer to his organisation as the ‘sangathan’, and many of the media executives he filmed assumed he was from, or was close to, the Nagpur-based Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The pitch ‘Acharya Atal’ made at these media houses, with some variations, was that in the run up to the 2019 election, his organisation wanted to promote the Hindutva agenda, beginning with ‘soft Hindutva’ content for the first three months with largely religious messaging, followed by ‘semi-political’ material which would include ‘character assassination’ of opposition leaders Rahul Gandhi, Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav, followed also by content that would eventually help polarise Hindus and Muslims.
In the first part of ‘Operation 136’ – which derives its name from the rank India got in the World Press Freedom Index of 2017 – cobrapost.com has reproduced the excerpts of interactions its undercover journalist had with India TV, which belongs to Rajat Sharma, an editor known to be close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi,
India’s largest Hindi newspaper Dainik Jagran,
local Uttar Pradesh channel Hindi Khabar, the entertainment and news television company
SAB Group,
the English newsaper DNA (Daily News and Analysis) which is owned by Zee and
Dainik Bhaskar, Amar Ujala, the news agency UNI, the entertainment channel 9X Tashan, the UP news channel Samachar Plus, the Uttarakhand channel HNN 24×7, the Hindi newspapers Punjab Kesari and Swatantra Bharat,
web portals ScoopWhoop and Rediff.com, IndiaWatch, Hindi newspaper Aaj and the influential Lucknow-based news channel, Sadhna Prime News.
https://thewire.in/media/large-medi...eals-for-paid-news-to-promote-hindutva-agenda
https://www.cobrapost.com/blog/Operation-136/1029
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