(This is a reprint from NewsBred).
There is a good reason to believe that mainstream English newspapers in India keep masses uneducated. Most of it stems from bias. A lot has also to do because journos themselves are uneducated. They can't speak or write on any subject coherently. At best they are quote-renters. At worse, remotely controlled by compromised bosses, politically aligned. The whiff of money and power also keeps them drugged.
Look at the data issue currently clouding our mornings. Aadhaar of course is unpalatable to these journos. In the name of data breach, for months at end, the mainstream media is trying to discredit it. So when Union Minister of State, KJ Alphons made a spirited defence of it, Hindustan Times on its front page accused him for kicking up a "fresh row." The stable of Times of India called it "bizarre." Indian Express buried it on Page 10.
What Mr Minister has done is to ask a few simple questions:
(a) Aadhaar only asks for your name and address to go with identification. When a telephone directory can have your name and address, why not Aadhaar?
(b) When you apply for US Visa, everything of yours, including your body, is laid bare, so why object Aadhaar?
(c) Not a single breach of Aadhaar data has occurred in the past three-and-a-half years.
A sensible and responsible media ought to have reflected and posed these questions to its readers in response:
(a) When you give your personal details to earn loyalty points and discounts in a shopping mall, why not Aadhaar?
(b) When you give your personal details for mobile numbers, Facebook, banks and passports, why not Aadhaar?
(c) When in order to get a blue tick on twitter, you give all your personal information, why not Aadhaar?
Yet, all we get is the minister being accused of being "bizarre" and "kicking up a row." Row? Who's in opposition? Obviously the mainstream media itself is offended and nobody else.
Never would you see an English mainstream media applauding Aadhaar for ostensibly eliminating fake subsidies, throwing out middlemen out and; securing direct subsidies to poor and needy. Damn it, I would let government put every bit of me under a scanner if the rampant corruption could be rooted out.
Those in support of corrupt practices are obviously corrupt. The implication is clear for mainstream media. Yet in the name of privacy, they are using hammers and axes of lies everyday to dismantle Aadhaar. And to keep us "uneducated" on Aadhaar's overwhelming benefits.
Since "data breach" is the current flavour, in the wake of Facebook outrage,the English mainstream media has gone berserk on the NaMo App. Indian Express has spilled over columns and pages in ugly multi-layered headlines on NaMo App to convey private information of its users are being passed on to US companies. This has followed on Rahul Gandhi claiming that the Prime Minister is "spying" on "personal data" of users.
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