On Police’s Rebuttals Of The Wire And IANS Reports And Leftist Media’s Silence On it

Recently, the state police of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, through their official Twitter handles, have refuted two separate reports by portal Thewire.in and news agency IANS, respectively.

Curiously, there has been a near total silence of the Leftist media, that dominates the news industry, on these rebuttals.

This is in sharp contrast to cases in the recent past where the same media attacked publications whose reports were similarly rebutted by the police.

We, at Swarajya, are documenting this to show the Leftist media and ideologically aligned fact-checkers’ bias in reporting about police rebuttals to media reports.

For the record, we do not consider police rebuttals by themselves alone as fact-checks or irrefutable truths.

Punjab police call report by The Wire as fake

On 8 April, the publication carried a report titled ‘Punjab: Muslims Families Hide in Riverbed After Being Driven From Hoshiarpur Villages’. The report was written by a reporter named Prabhjit Singh.

“Several children, women and men on Wednesday continued to hide themselves in the Swan riverbed, without food for three days now, on the Punjab side of the state’s marshy borders with Himachal Pradesh. They were allegedly abused, beaten and chased away from their mud-house settlements in villages in the Talwara block of Hoshiarpur district,” the report said.

Siddharth Varadarajan, chief editor of Thewire.in, then tweeted out the report on his account.

The official handle of Hoshiarpur Police, @PP_Hoshiarpur, however said it is “fake news”. The handle also asked Varadarajan to not post articles that create panic among the people in the time of crisis.

The handle also posted videos of some Gujjars, who the ‘thewire.in’ had reported were beaten up and were surviving without food, saying that they were getting supplies from the government.

In some truly harsh words, Surendra Lamba, an IPS officer, replied to Varadarajan’s post saying, “Responsible People Should Behave More Responsible at the times of such crisis. Must avoid posting Facts/News which is not authentic and can create panic among communities. Good job @PP_Hoshiarpur.”

It was only on 13 April that Varadarajan posted the portal’s answer to the allegations of fake news.

UP police call report by IANS as fake

On 12 April, news agency IANS published a report titled ‘In A Shocking Incident, Mother In UP Throws 5 Children Into River’. The report was carried by a number of publications including Outlookindia.com, Indiatvnews.com, Businessinsider.in and India Today-owned Lallantop.

Many influential social media users including Kavita Krishna amplified it.

On 13 April, the official handle of Bhadohi police refuted the report. The handle said that the mother, Manju Devi, indeed threw the children in the river but did so not out of hunger but after a fight with her husband.

The handle also posted the statement of the investigating police officer saying the same.

It is a stand of Swarajya that police rebuttals are not fact-checks by themselves. They are merely police’s versions and are open to further scrutiny.

However, fact-checking portals repeatedly use police rebuttals to put the “fake news” label on publications or reports they don’t agree with.

Recently, such portals gave wide coverage to the police rebuttal of a tweet by news agency ANI.

The agency corrected its information after the police’s reply, but faced a massive smear campaign for the error.

As Swarajya earlier reported, the same portals ignored a gave error by news agency PTI where it had declared a Muslim man dead when he was alive. The story was about a communal attack.

Altnews.in recently published a report where it cited a rebuttal by Saharanpur police to reports by Amar Ujala and Patrika. The portal, without carrying the version of the publications, termed their reports as “misreporting”.

It is also being repeatedly seen that police rebuttals of any report involving Tablighi Jamaat or Muslims are being cited as fact-checks and their publishers are being subjected to massive trolling, where rebuttals of other reports are being ignored.