Reuter’s Journalists, Christopher Bing, Raphael Satter, and Jack Stubbs unjustly charge and designate an innocent small-scale herbal medicine businessman as a hacker, even falsely informing the Indian national media that it was a picture gaffe.
The owner of a herbal medicine business was tagged as a wanted hacker in an exclusive investigation published earlier this month on The Print. He was then questioned by Delhi Police.
The three journalists, Christopher Bing, Raphael Satter, and Jack Stubbs came to India after a story in which they held a common man as a hacker. According to claims, it was a photo error caused by entities with the same address. However, this is not entirely accurate.
One of the journalists, Mr. Gupta of Belltrox, was said to have started pestering the ostensibly innocent man while he was sipping coffee in front of his office building. Despite presenting the journalists his identification, they refused to budge and published his photo in their piece, even tagging him as the villainous hacker. This was a deliberate act in comparison to the typical photo error caused by misleading information or neglect on the internet. They went on to publish this innocent man’s photo in their article, resulting in his slander.
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.
These prominent investigative journalists later acknowledged the intended damage. It is evident that this was done on purpose to spice up their tale. According to the Reuters explanation, the problem occurred because the addresses of the victim and the suspected hacker, Mr. Gupta, were the same, which is factually inaccurate. They don’t even share a structure.
The picture was taken outside the building, as previously reported. The journalists never ever visited their workplace. They arrived to the area and spotted a random individual outside Belltrox’s office building, which they photographed and utilized despite his denials that he was the addressed entity.
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 will get highly affected if such reporting is not condemned as such practices would call legal actions as well.
