MEDIA SCOPE
If you do not like anything on site, please know that this site is for entertainment purpose only. We are not responsible for any damage that happens to you if you believe or refuse to believe what we say in the site. We are also not responsible for any emotional trauma you face because of this site. We are also not sure whether that trauma is good for you or bad for you. You are responsible for whatever you do. Don’t blame us nor try to restrict our freedom of expression in any way,” says the disclaimer on Jagrukbharat.com.
It is one of the news sites I came across while trawling scores of them for a story on funded news start-ups. It personifies the reality of news and information in what The Economist refers to as “Posttruth politics”, in the “Art of the lie” (September 10-16, 2016). The term literally means a reliance on assertions that “feel true” but are not based on facts. Posttruth politics is based on the assertion that the truth is of secondary importance.
It then helps people frame debates the way they want to. In this world Donald Trump can say that Barrack Obama is the founder of ISIS or politicians in the UK can lie blatantly about the costs of leaving the European Union. In this world, an entire machinery working at discrediting everything about Jawaharlal Nehru — his name, parentage, private life, beliefs on India — is having spectacular success. Millions of people have watched, read, downloaded, and passed on all kinds of fantastic accusations against Nehru on YouTube, WhatsApp and Facebook because it “feels true”. Read “The Nehru You Don’t Know”, The Times of India, May 15, 2016, for a measured look at the vilification of Nehru.
One of Jagrukbharat’s lead pieces on September 21 this year was that the collapse of the twin towers on September 11, 2001, was the result of a controlled demolition and not an act of terror, according to analysis by the European Scientific Journal. The journal, a respectable, academic one, had this to say: “Regarding the recent developments on social media, we would like to inform the public that neither the European Scientific Journal, ESJ nor the European Scientific Institute, ESI have published content on the 9/11 attack.”
You could dismiss Jagrukbharat and the hundreds of sites like it as irrelevant. It gets less than a fraction of the traffic of any mainstream news app or website like NDTV, Inshorts or Dailyhunt. You could also point to the scores of newspapers, magazines and TV channels that have a tiny audience and carry what seems like ridiculous pieces of news. You could argue that much of this sensationalist, factually flawed stuff happened 25 years back, too. Nobody believed it then. Why should it matter now?
There are two differences between then and now that the excellent story in The Economist points out. One, the institutions audiences trusted and turned to figure out the truth — mainstream media, academics, government, scientific establishments, the judiciary — no longer enjoy the same trust. They have been systematically discredited. For instance, by attacking scientific establishments on climate change, conservatives ensured that higher costs wouldn’t be imposed on businesses in order to meet demands on climate change. Now when the media, academics or others point to the obvious based on facts, it is seen as an attempt to obfuscate things by the “liberal elite”.
Two, the sheer multiplication and amplification the lie-producing industry gets, thanks to social media. It is a power that a financially battered mainstream media is just not able to cope with. Increasingly, people get their news from social media. Mainstream media is regulated with licences, content codes, defamation laws and the like. It cannot say the things people do on the internet or on social media. They do it without a news licence, bank guarantees, funding transparency, journalism training or a code of ethics. All they need is a disclaimer of the sort Jagrukbharat puts out.