It is now the norm for the goings on in the Twitterverse to become news. A Twitter spat, a trending hashtag or Twitterati “reacting” to a particular news event have all become set templates for quick stories that new and legacy media churn out by the day. But what happens when such stories end up amplifying prejudice, or worst, spread misconceptions?

Recent reportage, if you can call it that, on the so-called cut-off for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) students in Delhi University is an important case study in this context. One where sections of the news media acted as force multipliers for bias against affirmative action rather than provide much-needed context to the story.

On August 3, The Indian Express’ web desk published a story with the headline: “Delhi University: PhD Mathematics cut off for SC/ST at zero, shocked students take to twitter”. The story had about five tweets from “shocked students”, one of whom said: “Imagine, a person who can’t score single marks can be ur Professor”.

On Facebook, it posted the story and asked its over 60 lakh followers: “Is this FAIR?!”

Besides The Indian Express, outlets like India Today also carried a story based on Twitter reactions, with the headline: “Zero cut-off at Delhi University (DU) for PhD Mathematics for SC/ST students, twitter reactions”. The story quotes Indian Express and has four tweets. On Facebook, India Today Education shared the story and declared, “Shocking!”.

It isn’t clear how the web desks at IE and India Today came to the conclusion that these tweets were from DU students — none of their profiles explicitly state so. But that is a minor quibble. Both these reports furthered the notion that a chunk of students in the reserved categories had scored zero in their written tests and were underserving of being called for the interview.

The genesis of the story is in a July 25 notification issued by the Delhi University’s Department of Mathematics.

The notification listed the names of 223 PhD applicants who had been called for interviews—the next step in the application process after the marklist is released—which were scheduled between July 31 and August 4.

The notification also listed the category-based minimum marks for students under different categories, namely, unreserved, Other Backward Classes (OBC), SC and ST.

The zero per cent cut-off for the SC and ST category here actually meant that there was no cut-off for the reserved categories. This is a fairly common practice across many departments to fill up SC and ST seats, which often fall short of students. This fact is made clear by a Press Trust of India story that has a comment from the head of the Maths department, who said that there were “no minimum marks for SC, ST students”.

PTI quotes him further to state: “We have to call everyone for the interview. Final selection will be based on the performance in the interview.” This is not to say that the PTI copy does not have its sets of problems. The peg again is angry reactions with just two examples — “Those who have scored zero will do PhD and teach you! Seriously? A Zero?” – but at least it reaches out to the university authorities to clear the air. This was evidently too difficult for large news organisations like the Express and India Today.

As if to milk the outrage enough, or more accurately generate some more, the Express web desk published another story on August 5 with another set of tweets – some of which were from the August 3 story. The story again does not take the pains to reach out to the university department. There appears to be no explanation of the story doubling up other than a cynical approach to ensuring maximum hits from a needless controversy.

Newslaundry got in touch with Nandagopal Rajan, new media editor at the Express, to know why it wasn’t thought important to reach out to DU to present the facts on why the cut-off was zero for SC and ST students. “This is the way how we tackle stories,” Rajan said, responding to why the Express did not clarify with the university. In IE’s defence, Rajan said, “We had checked the cut-off on the DU website,” adding, “it was a PTI copy.” When this correspondent pointed out that the story didn’t indicate that it was an agency copy, Rajan said, “That’s a mistake then, we usually should add ‘with PTI inputs’ but might have missed it.”

If the Express did run a PTI copy, it raises another editorial flag—because the PTI copy (carried by IE’s sister publication Financial Express as well as Business Standard) included comments from the head of a Math department, which were conveniently left out. We also reached out the India Today Chief Sub Editor Megha Chaturvedi, who heads the education team, and were unable to elicit a response. Members of her team, however, informed us that they will be getting in touch with DU authorities for a follow-up.

Newslaundry also attempted to reach out to V Ravichandran, head of DU’s Department of Mathematics, to ask if the notification could have been better worded to indicate the admission process and get more clarity on the cut-off marks for SC and ST students. We also reached out to Gurpreet Tuteja and Ashutosh Bhardwaj, both members of the university’s admission committee. While the HOD’s office and Bhardwaj gave Newslaundry an appointment for the morning of August 9, Tuteja is yet to respond to our repeated attempts to get in touch via texts and calls.

When Newslaundry reached out to Ravichandran and Bhardwaj at the appointed time, they failed to honour their appointments. We did, however, assess the mark list of MPhil and PhD students and, needless to say, a majority of the students in SC and ST categories scored way above zero.

The reportage on the notification apart from highlighting the pitfalls of journalism-for-clicks again points at the lack of diversity in the newsroom. Surely, if both Express and India Today newsrooms had journalists from the so-called reserved categories, the reportage wouldn’t have ended up being so callous. At the very least, there would have been an attempt to correct the narrative with follow-up stories.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @quilledwords.