PRIYANKA PULLA: When a News Article Vanishes, We Have More Than Just a Pandemic to Worry About

By Dilip -
Last week, The New Indian Express, one of India’s major English newspapers, pulled down an article that was heavily critical of the Centre’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The article, entitled ‘Centre’s COVID-19 Communication Plan: hold back data, gag agencies and scientists’, discussed the government’s reluctance to share outbreak-related data and attempts to muzzle scientists.

It noted how scientists from India’s apex medical research agency, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), have suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the health ministry’s daily COVID-19 press briefings. It also claimed ICMR had disbanded an expert panel it had previously set up to study COVID-19 drugs and vaccines because the group’s members had been critical of the government’s actions. The article was published on The New Indian Express‘s website at 7:09 pm on May 8, and it disappeared from its link within a day without any explanation. The page at the same link now has a short message: “Oops! Looks like you are looking for a page that doesn’t exist or has been moved.”

Journalists speculated that the Centre may have pressurised the newspaper to pull down the article and that the newspaper complied. An article in The Caravan on March 31 described how Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met several heads of media publications ahead of the first lockdown, and requested them to carry positive stories about the government’s COVID-19 response. However, The Wire Science‘s questions to The New Indian Express‘s editor-in-chief G.S. Vasu, asking if government pressure was the reason the article was retracted, went unanswered. The author of the piece, health journalist Sumi Sukanya Dutta, also didn’t respond to questions.

In India, news reports often disappear the way The New Indian Express‘s report did. On May 27, 2019, The Caravan listed 10 such articles that newspapers had retracted during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first term, likely because they were unfavourable to his administration. One of them was an article published by The New Indian Express; it was retracted after it raised issues with an Ahmedabad-based bank whose director was home minister Amit Shah, as The Wire reported. Now, it seems this phenomenon has come to plague public health journalism as well, in the midst of an epidemic that has claimed at least 2,415 lives in the country thus far. The appalling irony is that the government – and probably a newspaper’s editors as well – gagged a journalist for criticising the gagging of scientists. One can’t make this stuff up.

Transparency helps fight outbreaks: Refusing to share data during an outbreak is immoral because it costs lives. This argument underlies journalistic coverage of the lack of transparency during an outbreak. It is also why The New Indian Express article was important. A copy archived by the Wayback Machine is available to read here... read more:
https://science.thewire.in/health/new-indian-express-article-takedown-health-ministry-icmr-secrecy/



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