Facing enemies across our nation’s borders is an everyday affair for the Indian governments, over the last 75 years. These enemies are conspicuous and have an overt intension of fighting our country for their beliefs. But now we face a new enemy in the form of foreign media outlets who spread malicious lies, misinformation and fake new.
The leading news
agency in this war against India is the Thomson Reuters corporation based in
Toronto, Canada. Reuters has an interesting past. It was founded by German born
Paul Reuter who worked at a book-publishing firm in Berlin and was involved in
distributing radical pamphlets at the beginning of the ‘Revolutions of 1848’
which were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe that started that
year. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history to
date.
In its current
form, where Reuters is a part of the Thomson media group, its anti-establishment
behavior has not changed. This media company refuses to call terrorists as ‘terrorists’,
as part of its “value – neutral values”, which basically means that it has no
values to adhere to.
New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman rebuked Thomson Reuters for selling access to key economic survey data two seconds early to high-frequency algorithmic traders. The story strongly suggested that some Thomson Reuters customers were using their two-second head start (an eternity in the modern world of computerized trading) to front-run the markets.
From being accused
for working with Western Intelligence agencies to promote their governments agendas
across the world, to being sued for breach of contract by its employees, this
company has been in a number of controversies. The Thomson family itself is
full of controversies, hidden away behind a wall of legality. Theirs is a world
where trust is illusive, motives are suspect and opportunists abound.
Relationships are mediated by lawyers, litigation chisels away at personal
relationships, private lives are defined as "exclusive property" in
confidentiality agreements.
In the spring of
2003, a grand jury in USA called in a probe of a private detective named Anthony
Pellicano who allegedly was involved in spying activities on behalf of a
Thomson family member. It was not the first time the Los Angeles private
detective's name had surfaced in relation to Thomson's legal disputes. Pellicano
first provided aid to Taylor Thomson (heir to the Thomson Corporation’s
fortune) in early 2002, and the indictment suggests he continued working on her
case over the ensuing months. In late 2002, FBI agents raided the offices of
Pellicano and uncovered a cache of illegal explosives. Pellicano later pleaded
guilty to these charges and was sentenced to 30 months in jail. But what
investigators also unearthed in the detective's offices were transcripts of
recorded conversations, tapes and computer files, which led to an intense
investigation. Pellicano now faces charges connected to a vast espionage
operation, whose targets may have included Thomson's legal adversaries.
This private detective and some of his clients are said to have used illegally gathered information to secure "a tactical advantage in litigation by learning their opponents' plans, strategies, perceived strengths and weaknesses, settlement positions, and other confidential information."
In 2020, Reuters announced that it was mobilizing and expanding its fact-checking unit to fight misinformation on social media, but was itself spreading misinformation on a regular basis. In August 2022, Reuters had been accused by the Government of Turkey for targeting that country by publishing misleading and fake news.
On June 9, 2020,
three Reuters journalists Jack Stubbs, Raphael Satter, and Christopher Bing
personally visited India, and incorrectly used the image of an Indian herbal
medicine entrepreneur in an exclusive story titled: "Obscure
Indian cyber firm spied on politicians, investors worldwide". Raphael
Satter initially claimed that they had mistaken the man for the suspected
hacker Sumit Gupta because both men share the same business address. A check by
local media however showed that both men were in different buildings and not as
claimed by Raphael Satter. The prominent investigative
journalist later acknowledged that the false story was published without
proper investigation with the purpose to spice up the tale.
Thomson Reuters as an organization never accepts its role in the spread of fake and misleading news. In 2018, it ran a “poll” that ranked India as the most dangerous in the world for women. When challenged by Indian journalists; Belinda Goldsmith, editor-in-chief of the Thomson Reuters foundation stated that the report was “not based on Data but on perception”, and that it was researched with a sample of 548 responses in a country of 1.3 billion people. Goldsmith never acknowledged this story as fake, nor did Reuters apologize for publishing an untrue and misleading story.
In October 2022, in a propaganda piece published in 'Context' (a media platform run by Thomas Reuters Foundation), its journalist Rina Chandran alleged that disinformation, which supposedly originated in India, was the cause of Hindu-Muslim unrest in Leicester city in England’s East Midlands region. Rina Chandran has a history of peddling fake news. For years now, Chandran has been using social media platforms to vilify India and make false allegations. In April this year, Chandran resorted to scaremongering and spreading fake news alleging that Hindu goons in India were destroying Muslim livelihoods, but without providing any evidence to prove her claims.
When caught, the usual defense of Thomson Reuters is that they are a “wire service” that compiles reports from across the globe and forwards these reports to its consumers in an “unbiased” manner, thereby putting the onus of responsibility onto the reporters. In reality however, Thomson Reuters promotes news from leftist–liberal reporters, in a manner that barely keeps it from stepping into the domain of fake news, but firmly within the domain of misrepresented news; which they later either withdraw or issue corrections upon; after the required damage has been done.
Reuters
mostly targets countries in Asia as part of the North American – British –
European propaganda. It pretends to be an upstanding organization that promotes
high ethical standards against corruption and calls itself a defender of human
rights; while ignoring the fact that politicians in Europe have caught indulging
in massive corruption, and those in North America are frequently abusing the
rights of their own citizens.
In conclusion, any news from Thomson Reuters has to be considered as fake and anti–India propaganda, without any reservations whatsoever.
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