Peeping Toms Of Gobar Journalism

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The Fiberal Lie-sense

Today, February 12, marks the 3rd Anniversary of MediaCrooks. From about the 8 or 9 lines I first wrote under “Time to rein in the Indian media” in 2010, I’m happy to be still here and writing. This is as good a time as any to take another look at our Fiberals.

I came across this unusual article by one TCA Srinivasaraghavan in the Hindu Businessline titled “Narendra Modi — India’s Nixon”? This appearing in a commie newspaper like The Hindu must have been an accident. TCA’s article is a well-directed missile against the so called liberals but he gets it a bit wrong when he equates Modi with Nixon and about India’s so called liberals. Let’s read a bit before we go further (edited excerpts in blue).

Few Indians today remember Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th President of the US. He broke US law by obstructing justice and was forced to resign in 1974, halfway through his second term. Probably true but I have studied the Nixon story very closely and both Watergate and Nixon have frequently found mention on this blog, so I can claim not to have forgotten. Richard Nixon spent his last days in office 'covering-up'. Modi has been voted four times to office and is not busy with any cover-up.

Indeed, the utter illiberality of the liberals is one of the greatest paradoxes of our time. Academics have pondered long and deep over it and failed to come up with a solution. They seem as helpless as when trying to explain the depravities of the deeply devout… What happened to Nixon is very similar to what has been happening to Narendra Modi since 2002. In a nutshell, the American liberals had decided that Nixon was unfit to govern the US and went after him… In exactly the same way, the urban Indian liberals have decided that Modi is unfit to govern India. And they have been going after him, prepared like the Americans in the 1970s, to accept incompetents instead… This illiberal face of the liberals is seldom commented upon in India because if you do, the pack labels you as illiberal. That is their power… So who is a liberal, then? A liberal, by my reckoning, is a person designated as a liberal by other liberals, usually on a single communal sub-criterion. As a result, the most liberal person can be labelled illiberal by liberals and the most illiberal as liberal.

When Richard Nixon, a Republican, lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 there were suspicions of ballot bungling in Chicago but he chose not to make an issue of it. (Oh incidentally, who do we relate ballot or EVM bungling with in India?) Then, remember, despite the liberals hounding Nixon (as TCA suggests) he won two elections and came to office in 1969 and 1973. It’s what he did towards the end of his first term that is known as the Watergate scandal. The Watergate burglary itself was just a cover. Even the reason for the burglary has many theories. While commonly accepted theory is that the burglars wanted to bug the Democratic HQ at the Watergate building, no bugs were found. So the other theory is that the burglars may have wanted to recover a damning tape, of a sex racket, that involved a top official of the Nixon administration who was also sentenced in the scandal. Nixon himself wasn't known to have anything to do with the Watergate burglary.

What the Watergate scandal did expose was the massive operation to re-elect Nixon through misuse of campaign funds and defaming opponents. The well-organised campaign to plant fake stories about opponents, tarnish their reputations, manufacture lies and scandals was internally referred to as ‘Rat-F*****g’ (RF). Now, it’s members connected to the ‘CREEP’ (Committee to re-elect the president) who were involved in these covert operations and not liberals. Our commies are carrying out exactly the same RF operation for over a decade against Modi, aren’t they? They’re not really the liberals as TCA suggests.

The covert operations included marginalising various govt bodies including FBI and various other institutions of the govt. In India, with whom do you associate the marginalisation and misuse of CBI, IT Dept, ED, Judiciary and other govt institutions? That wasn’t the liberals in America doing that operation, was it? In contrast who is doing the RF operation against Narendra Modi and other opponents of Congress in India? Not too hard to guess eh? In the end Nixon was damned by his own tapes that he secretly maintained at the White House. The other erroneous mistake that TCA (and many others) make is that they equate “liberals” everywhere. The liberals or liberalism in the US has nothing in common with those calling themselves liberals in India. The first and biggest difference is freedom of speech. The US First Amendment provides for complete freedom of speech, the Indian liberals will never subscribe to such a freedom for anyone but themselves. When Obama won the recent elections our commie idiots celebrated as if the “liberal” win in the US is equivalent of a Congress win in India. In reality, neither the Congress party nor our so called liberals have anything in common with American liberalism.

What passes off as the liberal view in India is essentially the Communist view. Whether it’s text books, history books or the mainstream media it’s the communists and not liberals who have populated these areas. The commies suffer from a severe disease of intolerance of any view that does not match with their ideology. The Congress is pretty much a communist party which is why it gets on better with the CPM/CPI than with any truly democratic, liberal party. Given years of oppression and suffering of masses, most Indian political parties have a communist and socialist ideology. Consequently, the word “Socialist” was inserted into to our constitution.

One of the fundamental principles of a liberal is that s/he is strongly in opposition to monarchy and dynasty. Are our liberals anything like that? Those who call themselves liberals are mostly slaves of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and other political dynasties. So TCA is wrong to even tag them as liberals. I call them Fiberals, which is far more appropriate. They pretend to be liberal and fib all their lives because they possess the lie-sense. So it’s not true liberals but commie Fiberals who are hounding Modi. Just look at the campaign by the likes of Aakar Patel and Ram Guha. Theirs would qualify to be categorised under the ‘RF’ operation during Nixon’s re-election campaign.

I had mentioned to Newslaundry that if I were to criticise Modi and Gujarat I would have been a panellist on many channels. It will surprise many that this blog doesn’t criticise any CM or any state. Isn’t that how Aakar built his career? From ranting against Modi in some ordinary rag he is now a regular TV panellist and to add to his Modi-hating resume he now runs a dedicated series on Modi in DNA newspaper. If that is not RF, what is? Look at the headline from NDTV. A separatist is a “moderate”? By what liberal measure is any separatist a moderate? It’s pretty much a communist idea that Arundhati Roy, friend of Yaseen Malik and Maoists, will agree to. In the US you may not be prosecuted with speeches that Yaseen gives but if he were to act and invoke people to secede he would be prosecuted for treason and sentenced to death. But for NDTV this guy who hangs out with Hafeez Saeed, a terrorist and enemy of India, is a moderate. And why is Malik with Saeed? To protest the hanging of another terrorist, Afzal Guru!

Who’s the likely beneficiary of the hate campaign against Modi? It is obviously a party that runs more like a monarchy which should have been the natural enemy of liberals. In India, the liberals are in love with this monarchy which is why the term “liberals” is a fake tag. Fiberals is the right tag. Let’s have some fun. Let’s see the definition of liberals by the Fiberals. There’s Rajdeep’s tweet about Salman Taseer, the Pak politician who was killed. Isn’t that a perfect definition of Rajdeep’s liberals? Sure I’m picking funny tweets but Rajdeep isn’t really joking. Umm… that’s the general definition of a liberal by our media standards. Wine, women and…RF?

Next, the other thing that a liberal believes in is absolute freedom of speech. S/he either responds to such speech or ignores or switches off speakers that don’t suit the liking. But no, our liberals want others to simply shut up so that they can have their monopoly on crap everywhere – On TV, in print, on Facebook, on Twitter; everywhere. And when they don’t like it they go to the extent of calling them trolls, uncouth, violent (on Twitter?). They want these trolls to shut up when they can very well use the block button as suggested. And, of course, these TV morons will complain about anonymous accounts on Twitter or FB but will gladly follow many anonymous accounts themselves. They wallow in this nonsense. Hardly liberal!

The biggest sign and identification of these liberals in India is their badge of hatred for anything Hindu or connected to Hindu culture. Hindus, Hindu icons, Hindu rituals and practices are all fair game for hatred for these Fiberals. But hey, mention the Religion of Peace or Christianity and they will all crawl under some stone. Their mouths and pens get zipped. The sword scares their pens! So TCA in The Hindu got it a bit wrong although his article was well-intentioned and technically correct. Those hounding Modi are NOT liberals. They are commie slaves to a monarchy. That’s what they are flanking and protecting. And they do so using the RF technique which involves heavy-duty lying. That’s the reason I call them Fiberals with a lie-sense. Some of them are paid, and showered honours too, for their services. 

 

Watergate - 40th Anniversary: Lessons For India

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Media Corruption: Indian Media Urgently Needs A Watchdog...

If there is one domain that seriously and urgently needs a watchdog like the CAG or the CVC it is the Indian media. It is easy to point fingers at politicians as the most corrupt but that is just half the truth. Politicians can be voted out, can be dismissed, can be prosecuted. What about the media though? Barkha Dutt, Vir Sanghvi and others from newspapers like Economic Times happily continue at their jobs and happily continue to peddle influenced opinions.

Any effort to seek accountability and responsibility from the media has faced the most vehement protests from them. All this under the guise of protecting “freedom of speech and freedom of the press”. The Press Council Of India and the Editors Guild are nothing more than coffee shop organisations with no binding guidelines whatsoever. In effect, the media has an extraordinary free run to mis-report, spread lies, and indulge in corruption without any liability. For an industry wielding such extraordinary powers, ability to influence policies and the course of a nation who exactly is the media responsible and accountable to? Nobody!

There is hardly a single newspaper or TV channel which has not claimed credit for exposing all the recent scams. This in itself is a blatant untruth. And they don’t stop at that. They even claim “exclusive” reportage of scams. The media IS the scam. It is agencies like the CAG or the CVC which still have some honest workers who have really exposed the corruption and not the media. The last pieces of investigative journalism in my memory have to be pieces like “Indira as Commerce”  by Arun Shourie or the “Bhagalpur Blindings” by the Indian Express. For comic relief, I can even offer a long list of plagiarised pieces passed off as editorials or reports. Laughable among them has to be the Times of India’s report on Aishwarya Rai on the Jerry Springer show or more recently Arun Poorie of India Today who blamed a plagiarised piece to “jet-lag”! The very integrity of mainstream media is “dubious”, to use kind words.

If there is a need for a JPC for the 2G spectrum scandal there is also an urgent need for a JPC to investigate the media, its funding and its collusion in the massive frauds perpetrated on the country. Here are excerpts from a report by the Global Financial Integrity (Read the full report here. Thanks to Vaidya who sent this in):

• From 1948 through 2008, India lost a total of US $213 billion in illicit financial flows (or illegal capital flight).  These illicit financial flows were generally the product of: tax evasion, corruption, bribery and kickbacks, and criminal activities.
• Adjusted Estimates: The present value of India’s total illicit financial flows (IFFs) is at least US $462 billion.
• Based on the last five years of the study, 2004-2008, India lost assets at a rate of US $19 billion per year.
• Total capital flight out of India represents approximately 16.6 percent of India’s GDP as of year-end 2008. In present value terms, India lost an equivalent of about 36 percent of its 2008 GDP which represents a staggering loss of capital.
• Some 68 percent of India’s aggregate illicit capital loss occurred after India’s economic reforms in 1991, indicating that deregulation and trade liberalization actually contributed to/accelerated the transfer of illicit money abroad.
• IFF Drivers: High Net-Worth Individuals (HNWIs) and private companies were found to be the primary drivers of illicit flows out of India’s private sector. 
• IFF Trends:  From 1948 through 2008 the Indian private sector shifted away from deposits into developed country banks and moved more of its money into offshore financial centers (OFCs).  The share of OFC deposits increased from 36.4 percent in 1995 to 54.2 percent in 2009.

There are high net-individuals in the media too. Much of the country’s corruption receives major support from such media crooks.

To borrow Rajdeep Sardesai’s words the Indian media has turned from “watchdogs to lapdogs”. Protestations of “freedom of press” cannot wash anymore. In a survey in TIME magazine in 2009 it was found most Americans turned to Jon Stewart of The Daily Show for credible news. What’s the surprise? The Jon Stewart show is actually a comedy show on a comedy channel. So much for mainstream media’s credibility in democracies.

Deep Throat of the infamous Watergate scandal advises Bob Woodward to “Follow the money”. It is probably time a body like the CAG or the CVC also followed the money and funding of the media houses. It is not just politicians, the Indian media urgently and desperately needs a watchdog. The media cannot be anymore given the luxury of having its own watchdog. Coffee shops like the PCI or the Editors’ Guild cannot be watchdogs.