Political scenarios continuously change over the years. Friends become enemies, while enemies make coalitions. But one thing does not change: NDTV’s hate towards the Bharatiya Janata Party. The sad part of this is that NDTV masquerades around like a neutral unbiased media house. It’s reach is huge, and is available in multiple languages and streams including online. People who are uninitiated to the likes of continuous anti – India and anti – BJP reporting by NDTV, are prone to fall prey to becoming misinformed. NDTV’s ex senior most journalist Barkha Dutt has always been known for her extremely biased reporting, and the channel has been known to have reported classified military information multiple times, which resulted in NDTV’s one day infamous ban penalty.
NDTV has a reputation and it has always maintained it, not because of running stories against the BJP or the military, but because of running the same stories as other media houses but tweaking it to make sure it is always negatively biased.
The recent most story which was tweaked was of India’s GDP in the third quarter. It has turned out to be at 7.1 percent as opposed to 7.4 percent in the second quarter. While every news house reported this positively and dismissed the post demonetization worry, NDTV reported it negatively, stating that demonetization has dragged down the GDP. Hindustan Times published a similar article within minutes.
Renowned economists like Amartya Sen and Manmohan Singh predicted a massive GDP hit in this quarter, and the largely expected figure was around 6 percent. The GDP sure took a hit, but not as much as the government hating body of pseudo-intellectuals thought it would. The figure defied expectations by far. Amartya Sen in his highly intelligent sounding article in the Hindustan Times had predicted a massive hit, which was a great talking point for people aiming crosshairs at the government. When everyone took the news of high GDP as a sign of relief stating demonetization did not impact it, NDTV stated the exact opposite.
Later on when it obviously drew comparison to the other news houses, it published several more articles on the topic, most of which were concerned with how to explain this “anomaly”. An article on the site questioned the credibility of the figure, and proposed that the government is misquoting and manipulating the figures. It was the first media house to doubt the figures and did it within minutes of the news.
Quoting PM Modi, “Numbers have come from the same place it always has come from.” If we are going to doubt the figures of this quarter, what should stop us from questioning the figures of every quarter or fiscal year since independence, including that of the UPA. If the present government can fabricate the figures, why should we trust 50 years of Congress?
With the figure out, the worst fears of the Indian economy has been put behind, says Arun Jaitley after returning from an investors meet in UK. Congress leader Anand Sharma accuses, “It’s not about statistics, it’s about ground reality”. According to him statistics have no correlation with ground reality.
The informal sector which has little to do with banking, does not show up in the figures which seems to have hit the hardest, says an article in the Hindustan Times which toes the line of NDTV. Within hours past the publication of GDP figures, HT posted a series of articles claiming why this figure can’t be trusted.
NDTV and Hindustan Times, are known to have published purposely misleading articles like Vijay Mallya’s loan write off and running them many times a day during cash crunch which lead an unexpectedly large number of people into thinking that the government has used their money to benefit him. Thus it is not far fetched to see, that these two media houses see the glass as half empty instead of half full. The article in HT doubts the numbers on the basis of, quote, “the numbers are too good to be true”. Sure the informal sector is not included and the Q3 of 2015 was slightly revised which shows up in the figures. Sure, the impact could be visible in Q4 as well. Still, the figure has crossed the expectations by far, which tells us how much of an exaggeration the expected hit on the economy was. We expect more articles on the same lines from all the mainstream media trying to somehow claim that the government tried to manipulate the GDP figures.
Even though hard work is not a direct link to the economic situation, Harvard is not a predictability factor either. Beyond all of this India continues to grow as the fastest major economy of the world, and is ahead of China which is known for its non transparent figures of growth.