‘A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.’

When Winston Churchill said this he was talking about Twitter. No, seriously.

But while all on social media know what to believe and what not to, considering images of Indonesia have been passed off as India and Singapore as Venezuela, people still wait for confirmation from more credible sources.  Which, believe it or not, are still journalists and news organisations. But journalists are spending that currency more recklessly than Vijay Mallya spent state loans on good times.

Here is a story of how propaganda becomes fact in a matter of few tweets, and how journalists make that happen.

On October 31, Rati Parker, a Right-wing social media warrior par excellence posed what was obviously a totally innocuous query on Twitter: Is the author of the much talked about Moody Analysis report on India, historian Irfan Habib’s son-in-law?

And how did that thought cross her mind? According to another tweet of hers, she had read it on Facebook and was only confirming it on Twitter. “My Q went viral!” she exulted.  To give Parker credit, it did go viral – and the query, like it often does on Twitter, became an assertion very soon. Who cares for trivialities like punctuation when you can sell a good story. But since one could write Parker off as the fringe, here entered a journalist as mainstream and credible as one could be: Tavleen Singh.  Singh, replying to a query on Twitter, lent credence to the rumour by adding an “I think” (for plausible deniability, we assume, so one can always say, What me? I didn’t say so) and repeating the lie. . Also tagged on this tweet was journalist Swapan Dasgupta. Singh’s tweet has got more than 850 retweets as I write this.  

With Tavleen Singh having put her weight behind the conspiracy theory, could heir apparent Rupa Subramanya be far behind?  Though she didn’t quite explicitly spell it out, it doesn’t really take a data guru to understand her insinuations.

Then on November 3, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s National Secretary and regular TV studio representative, Siddharth Nath Singh tweeted out what he had said earlier in the evening on a Times Now debate: the author of the much talked about Moody Analysis report on India was son-in-law of historian Irfan Habib.

Singh was essentially repeating a brazen lie he had uttered on prime-time television without being called out on it (not that it’s a particularly hard thing to do).

Now, Singh is a politician and politicians are guilty of much worse than lying.  Besides, Singh could always argue that he was only quoting what journalists had already confirmed. After all, one expects a journalist to put out only verified information in the public domain.

Finally today, Habib’s daughter clarified on Facebook that the author of the report was not related to her in any way – and that she was married to another man. 

 No one has bothered to apologise.  It’s unlikely anyone will.  Not that it matters because the damage is done: a completely unsubstantiated rumour made its way to prime-time television for the nation to know, where it passed off as the truth, totally uncontested.