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‘We report what we see’: Why Dainik Bhaskar’s Covid coverage stands out -Prateek Goyal & Ashwine Kumar Singh

-Newslaundry.com

The Hindi newspaper has aggressively spotlighted the ground realities that governments tried to hide from the public.

In the afternoon on April 10 this year, the editorial team of Divya Bhaskar in Ahmedabad gathered in the office to plan the next day’s edition. One news item caught the attention of the paper’s Gujarat editor, Devendra Bhatnagar. The state BJP president, CR Patil, had claimed that he would be giving away 5,000 remdesivir injections for free to Covid patients. When chief minister Vijay Rupani was questioned by reporters how his party’s leader had obtained a large stock of a drug that the public was struggling to buy even on the black market, he told them to ask Patil.

Bhatnagar found it baffling that Patil had procured such a large stock of a scarce drug and that Rupani seemed to be unaware about it. How were the people supposed to get an answer if not from the chief minister? The Bhaskar decided to publish Patil’s phone number so people could ask him directly. Thus was born the now famous front page.

A few days later the paper’s Bhopal edition got in on the act. “Government data on deaths is a lie, these burning pyres are telling the truth,” the newspaper declared in its top headline, accompanied by a drone photograph of burning funeral pyres at Bhadbhada Ghat, the city’s largest crematorium. It was as hard as any Indian media outlet had gone after the authorities for mishandling the Covid disaster. Not surprisingly, the paper drew a lot of praise.

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