PRIYANKA PULLA: When a News Article Vanishes, We Have More Than Just a Pandemic to Worry About
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article was retracted, went unanswered.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Express; it was retracted after it raised issues with an Ahmedabad-based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/