You would rather trust news from your trusted Facebook friend
Mainstream media journalists are fast losing trust due to their extremely biased reporting whether it is in India or US/Europe. According to this USA Today report, people are more likely to trust news shared by someone they trust on Facebook rather than a, the so-called “reputed” news publication. According to an online sample of US 1,489 adults taken by The Media Project, people trust their friends more than they trust the news source itself.
Although the above link – the author of the above link – errs in the second paragraph when he says that news organizations need to build strong online followings to counter fake news, the importance of building online ties cannot be ignored.
What I would suggest is, instead of these news organizations trying to build ties with people directly, it’s the actual reporters, the writers, who need to build relationships using social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. It’s not the news agencies per se that have lost trust, it’s the people associated with them, because after all, it’s the people who gather and broadcast news, not the agencies.
Yes, news agencies are responsible – if New York Times prints a lousy article about India the author is responsible, but the editorial board is also responsible for permitting all sorts of balderdash about India being spouted by mostly the anti-India lobby.
Even with all that money power, it’s easier for individuals to strike up strong bonds between social media users rather than news organizations. You don’t attack NDTV as viciously as you attack Barkha Dutt (attacking not in terms of, physically, but in terms of rebutting) is. It becomes more personal.
So if people are trusting an article that they have come across on Facebook, they’re not trusting it because it has come from a publication, they are trusting it because it comes from a person they trust. “Person” is the key word here.
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Narendra Modi is no pushover like Atal Bihari Vajpayee
Many people are commenting, especially the usual left-lib fear-mongering sorts, that with the elevation of Yogi Adityanath, Narendra Modi is going to meet the same fate that Atal Bihari Vajpayee did. Take for instance this Livemint article by a known BJP-hater: he suddenly finds Narendra Modi “moderate” since he finds Yogi Adityanath coming from the extreme right. He says Narendra Modi is getting too powerful for his own good.
By “too powerful” he means that he doesn’t hesitate from making a person like Yogi Adityanath the Chief Minister of one of the most populated regions of the world.
“A person like” means a person who wears a saffron robe. A person who has been accused of carrying out various “crimes” by a government of criminals. A person who calls a spade a spade although sometimes too bluntly for many people’s comfort (including yours truly).
People like Mihir Sharma assign their own tags to people and then give rise to their own fears and then they start spreading those fears among gullible people. This is why I say that they are so oblique that it is difficult to make out whether they really mean to say the things that they say or they are paid to blurt out various sorts of stupidities.
To be frank, we don’t know much of Yogi Adityanath. We don’t know what sort of administrator he is. We don’t know what are his political aspirations.
On the other hand, most of us know Narendra Modi. He is not Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Vajpayee was in the wrong party, in the whirlpool of wrong ideology. He should have been in the Congress or one of its offshoots but maybe there was no space for him – the sort of space he could wield in the BJP – so he made a compromise and eventually, faced political oblivion, may be at the hands of Narendra Modi.
Modi on the other hand doesn’t just know what he is doing, he also makes you do it. He’s not in the BJP as a compromise. He is turning the BJP into a pan-India party. He is on a sure footing.
Mihir Sharma conjectures that may be Narendra Modi was forced to make Yogi UP’s Chief Minister – wishful thinking.
People like him would like to see Modi weakened. A person who can deliver a speech of 60 minutes without even once referring to a piece of paper and who has the plan for next five years laid out in front of him, doesn’t just randomly take decisions. For all you know, he had known all along who would be UP’s Chief Minister if the BJP came to power – even before 2014.
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