Wire-Meta saga: Lies, fabrication, betrayal from champions of 'Freedom of Expression'

How editors of the self appointed news crusader portal threw every newsroom principle to the winds.

The Wire-Meta controversy seems to be a tale of lies, deception and brazen fabrication followed by betrayal. At least from what has come out in the public domain so far. But the biggest paradox is that it comes from a platform which claims to be one of the biggest, if not sole, custodian of media freedom in the country.

Despite being called out several times for their less than honest reporting in the past, thewire.in has always projected itself as some sort of a brave crusader for media freedom in a country where the political leadership is (as per them) out to finish all freedoms, including that of the press.

Though there have been half a dozen stories in the past as well, the current chain of events is typical of the dishonesty of a platform which thinks it can do no wrong even as most of their stories are directed in a predictable political direction.

To put it very briefly, the wire ran a couple of stories a few weeks back saying that 'crosscheck', an internal arrangement of Facebook (parent company Meta) had given special rights to Amit Malviya, the IT Cell head of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), by which he could take down any post that his party did not approve of. As examples, they mentioned two memes that had been pulled down from Instagram immediately after they were posted.

The stories were vehemently denied by both Meta as well as Malviya. The sordid tale could have ended there with thewire.in re-checking its reports. Instead, they brazened it out with more follow-ups and claims of documentary evidence in support of their charge.

Their 'evidence' was essentially an email by Meta executive Andy Stone. But Stone immediately pointed out that he had never written the purported email and that the URL did not appear to be of Meta.

It could still have ended there but thewire.in was ready to weave another set of lies. They challenged Stone's denial claiming that the emails had been verified by technical experts. Subsequently, those 'experts' named in the story came out in the public to say that they had done no such verification.

The portal still tried to persist for a while but the facts were already out in the open and the deceit became unsustainable. The Wire then 'withdrew' the stories but not before waxing eloquent on its 'standards' of journalism.

Amit Malviya has since filed a criminal and civil suit against the portal and Delhi Police is investigating the matter. Earlier too, the website's series of reports on the Rafale fighter jets and the Pegasus spyware had failed pas legal scrutiny. Lesser talked about stories such as newspapers not publishing in Kashmir valley, Muslims starving at the Punjab-Himachal border and shortage of life-saving drugs in Kashmir were summarily denied by the parties concerned.

Meanwhile, The Wire's management has filed a case against their own colleague, Devesh Kumar, whom they have accused of supplying them with fabricated mails and other misleading inputs. The portal even hinted at Kumar being 'mentally disturbed' in the formal complaint.

To sum it concisely, thewire.in's bosses published stories without verifying the authenticity of the inputs, brazened out when exposed, fabricated and forged electronic evidence to push their argument and when caught irrefutably, threw a colleague under the bus to wriggle out of their own culpability, regardless of the fact that their own names were very much in the bylines. In fact, they claimed ownership of the story proudly till the time the forgery became obvious.

In other words, every principle of the newsroom, from checking facts before writing to sticking with your team in crisis, was thrown to the winds by the editors. Even after all this, there are media organisations trying to give a safe exit passage to the portal by questioning the police investigation.

If lies, deceit and fabrication can be overlooked to give a safe passage, the media organisations or editors who are issuing these statements may also have a lot to answer.

It would not have mattered so much had these stories not been exploited by a section of people in the western media to attack and run down our democracy. Even as the controversy over the Meta stories was raging, thewire.in quietly took down its recent stories on Tek Fog app. These stories had claimed that the BJP was using this app to engineer trends and push up trends against its opponents.

The quiet withdrawal of the stories was proof enough that they too were baseless. But those stories had been picked up by the US government funded think-tank 'The Freedom House' to downgrade our democracy from 'free' to 'partly free'.

It is these ratings which go a long way in determining the attitude of the world towards a country from business and investment to politics, education and even international travel.

While The Wire has pulled down its reports, 'The Freedom House' has not clarified or retracted its faulty assessment. But the friends of thewire.in sitting in our journalist organisation still think the portal is synonymous with media freedom and hence such 'small issues' must be overlooked. If this is not political, we don't know what is.

(Smita Mishra writes on politics and current affairs)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of OneIndia and OneIndia does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.