Malayala Manjarama — The Postcard.news of Kerala
Kerala’s №1 yellow newspaper’s ideology happens to be a simple but toxic concoction of anti-leftism and greed for money. In the service of the latter part of that ideology, the newspaper has over the past year emerged as a tireless defender of rape accused actor Dileep, publishing hundreds of articles supporting him and dissing the women actors who stood up to others like him in the industry, in its web portal.
But when both those parts of the newspaper’s ideology comes together, it becomes a whole different beast, with it even going to the extent of sleeping with Hindutva as well as Islamist terrorists.
An example of that was seen today when they published a fake story on the front page on how Muhammed, the SDPI/PFI/Campus Front terrorist, who is an accused in the case related to the murder of SFI leader Abhimanyu is a “left sympathiser” and a “cyber comrade”. Proof? A sarcastic facebook post from the terrorist’s now deleted profile in which he mockingly posted a comment in the tone of a comrade, which ended with ‘tongue-out’ smileys. The terrorist had written similar sarcastic posts on RSS too. All the other posts on his profile are typical SDPI posts, including one celebrating the release from jail of the SDPI terrorists who chopped Professor Joseph’s hand and some other posts abusing CM Pinarayi Vijayan. Muhammed is also someone who holds posts in SDPI as well as Campus Front.
Manjarama being Manjarama, they chose to not see these posts. The fake news has been republished by others including yellow website Marunadan malayali, asianet online, news 18 etc. Fake news travels quite fast these days.
Jijo John Puthezhath, the journalist who wrote the piece is clearly not someone who can’t identify sarcasm when he sees it. This was part of an agenda to help the SDPI terrorists to deflect attention and blame CPI(M).
A short imaginary news report of how Jijo John Puthezhath would describe this scenario if he were to write a report on it-
*****
(Fake report begins)
“Kochi: The team investigating the murder of SFI leader Abhimanyu has confirmed that Jijo John Puthezhath is the kingpin of a racket of journalists who have close links to the top leadership of the extremist organisation SDPI.
Sources told Manjarama that Mr.Puthezhath was spotted in one of the city’s swanky bars with some SDPI leaders. It is believed that some of his recent news reports were aimed at generating sympathy for the organisation, which is facing heat over its recent murderous attacks. At this point, it is not clear whether money has exchanged hands, but the investigation team is looking into recent transactions in his account”
(Fake report ends)
*****
Manjarama has in recent months also used its television channel to spread fake news against the Kerala Government after the Ockhi cyclone and during the Nipah outbreak.
Till date, it has no history of printing an apology for any of these thousands of fake news items that it has published, just like the Sanghi fake news website Postcard.news. Even after social media backlash, they have never done that, for they know clearly that these criticisms in social media bubbles would never reach their core readers who are regularly brainwashed by the shit that they churn out everyday. By getting into bed with SDPI and its Hindutva variants, Manjarama is proclaiming it clear that not even terrorists are anathema when it comes to playing its anti-left agenda.
