Bhubaneswar: Newdigital channels emerge at regular intervals and it becomes difficult for media watchers to keep a count of it. But when these channels are driven by political agendas, they raise eyebrows.

Recently, a YouTube channel Political Lens (PL) entirely devoted a report spanning a few minutes to another YouTuber, stated to be its owner. The former kick-starts his narration by taking a jibe at those who have criticised the nuances of the YouTube channel ‘Satya Patha’ (SP) alleging that many of the former’s contents were superfluous and intended to derive benefits by projecting unsubstantiated details.

It is possible that any journalist is vulnerable to fact-finding flaws and this results in contents not going down well with the viewers. This can happen to any journalist due to factor such as getting the facts wrong.

Then the PL anchor starts heaping praise on the SP anchor as if the former has been an invention in the orbit of journalism who can never be questioned. As if, all his discourses in the YouTube channel were ground-breaking in essence.

One can recall when the SP anchor was incidentally a Resident Editor in a regional channel, every evening he used to hold a paper and say that ‘today we are going to reveal something (then he used to dangle the paper sheet before the camera) that would prove to be a big revelation against the BJD government (then led by Naveen Patnaik). Ultimately, the details turned out to be trivial and not worthy of the seriousness with which it was being claimed.

Anyway, in the present context, the PL anchor mentions many things in a generic manner to uphold the so-called reputation of the SP anchor by parroting the paeans to the latter. One does not know if that was an understanding built on fraternity or just ignorance of the PL anchor.

While propagating or doing damage control, the PL is required to underscore the issues but it was all again generic and boring. If the SP anchor was being trolled, then that should have been shown on the screen.

Ethically, while either praising or otherwise contradicting the stance of any reporter one must make a small research on the track-records in any format of the media. Since last February, what has become common with certain reporters, including that of SP and PL, is that for any evil in the world, they jump back to February 17, 2025 incident, in an esteemed institution, in which a student from Nepal reportedly committed suicide for some pressing personal reasons that led to students’ unrest on the campus.

That incident has turned to be a common reference point for a few channels for convenience, whereas, some similar or even worse incidents taking place anywhere else fail to get space. The suicide incident accentuated as a promontory of all the ills elsewhere. They somehow, retrospectively though, try to bring back that incident while closing their eyes to umpteen such incidents on other campuses in Odisha.

Rules of journalism sincerely puts this in bold that a journalist should not be driven by whims to praise or malign any other platform, let alone taking sides blindfolded or based on conjectures. When any activist steps into such campaigns, it becomes all the more lop-sided in tenor and tone thus propelling the reporting platforms to work overtime to heighten the agenda as it happened last February. It is anybody’s guess as to how agenda-driven manipulations are manufactured by self-styled RTI activists.