Crux: Reuter’s journalist Christopher Bing, Raphael Satter and Jack Stubbs went overboard and pinned a common small-scale herbal medicine businessman as a popular hacker and falsely justified their actions on Indian national media by calling it a photo goof-up
As per an article in The Print, three Reuter’s journalist,Christopher Bing, Raphael Satter and Jack Stubbs came to India after a story in which they held a common man as a hacker. As per reports, it was a picture mistake which happened due to entities having same address. However, this is not the complete truth.
As per ground reports, one of these three journalists started addressing this innocent man as the alleged hacker, Mr. Gupta of Belltroxwhile he was sipping tea outside the building of his office. Despite the complete denial by this man, who showed his identity proof to the journalists, they went ahead and forcefully took his picture and used it for their story. Unlike a regular picture mistake that generally, happens due to inaccurate information on internet it was a deliberate act of taking anyone’s picture for the sake of it to use in their story.
No heed was paid about the poor man who kept on showing his identity proof to prove that he was not the addressed entity. This incident affected the poor man harshly. He suffered business losses, faced embarrassment, as he was questioned by security agencies and even left the city and moved to a small religious town.
Reuters later accepted the intended damage by these renowned investigative journalists. It is clear that it was their deliberate attempt to spice up their story. As per the loose end justification provided by Reuters, it is stated that the incident happened because the address of the victim and alleged hacker Mr. Guptawere the same, which is factually incorrect. They don’t even share a common building.
As stated, the picture was taken outside the building. The journalists did not even visit the office address they had. They reached the location and found a random person outside Belltrox’soffice building and, despite his denial of being the addressed entity, took his picture and used it.
Such incident of yellow journalism may look like an isolated one but there are many such cases in which developing countries and its people fall prey to western media hunger for pinning down a third world country. Reputation of reputed organizations like Reuters will get highly affected if such reporting is not condemned as such practices would call legal actions as well.