Brilliant Yellow Journalism From Reuters

“In India, fears about the experiment spread rapidly through the media” - Reuters & quoted verbatim by MSNBC

“But in deeply religious and superstitious India…” - Reuters & quoted verbatim by MSNBC

What kind of stupid yellow journalism is this?

Who gave Reuters the right to categorize and denigrate a whole country based on its incorrect and biased views?

As an Indian, I deeply resent this piece of yellow journalism from Reuters.

Yellow journalism, in short, is biased opinion masquerading as objective fact. Moreover, the practice of yellow journalism involved sensationalism, distorted stories, and misleading images for the sole purpose of boosting newspaper sales and exciting public opinion. It was particularly indicative of two papers founded and popularized in the late 19th century

Yellow journalism is journalism that downplays legitimate news in favor of eye-catching headlines that sell more newspapers. It may feature exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, sensationalism, or unprofessional practices by news media organizations or journalists.

The job of a journalist is to report facts and only facts. The facts in this case was that a simple village girl was mislead by media (yellow journalism) into believing that the world was coming to an end. The media incorrectly highlighted speculations by some doomsayers without highlighting the negation of their views by reputed scientists. As a result a poor young women decided to end her life.

So yellow journalism by Indian press took one life in Bhopal and yellow journalism by Reuters managed to denigrate the whole country by telling the world that India as a whole is a “deeply superstitious” country! Bravo Reuters!

Have these journalists no shame? How can they sleep at night?

In US several people committed suicide for a much mundane event - passing of halle-boop comet. At that time I never heard that the US was deeply religious or superstitious. It was reported as simply few nutcases deciding to take their life, just an isolated incident.

What is it about traditional media? Why do they pounce upon every opportunity to denigrate so-called “third world” countries like India or China and feed to already existing biases and superstitions of the so-called “first world”?

Maybe it is time to throw these decaying bastions of the old press like Reuters and move forward into the brave new world of blogs and online media.

Few thoughts to Reuters journalists about India:

1. India may be religious (and I surely hope it is so) but there are following widely different religions and beliefs and also lot of Indian actively practice aethesism. In mention of aethesism (charbak) is ingrained and referenced even in our so-called religious texts. Having said that countries like USA are also deeply religious by and large and so are most other countries. What is wrong with being religious?

2. Being religious has nothing to do with superstition. I have seen superstitions everywhere in the world, religion or no religion. Why do people teach youngsters superstitions and plain lies like Santa Claus or tooth fairies or Halloween?

3. The most important message I want to give to Reuters journalist is that don’t attempt to categorize a large body of people (1/5 of the world population last I checked) without having deep knowledge about them and their culture. That is plain idiotic. Just the facts ma’am.