The Tweet That Wasn’t

The Odisha chief minister’s office (CMO) tweeted last week about an Oxford University study that found the ‘Ganjam model’ of Covid management praiseworthy and worthy of emulation. The CMO complimented ‘Team Ganjam’ for what it had done to halt the contagion and attributed the ‘success’ to ‘empowering panchayats, forming committees in villages for intensive screening and by providing proper healthcare’. By next day, the CMO took down the tweet. It fell for fake news.

The CMO’s tweet was based on a story that appeared in a little-known website, pledgetimes.com, which mentioned the Oxford study but failed to quote from it or anyone associated. When pressed, an officer shared the link to an Oxford study. But he had not taken the trouble of reading what it contained—and more importantly what it did not. Forget praising the ‘Ganjam model’, it did not even mention Ganjam or, for that matter, Odisha. The study was carried out in 310 cities worldwide of which five were from India and none of them was from Odisha.

Coming as it did from no less than the CMO, media threw the basic journalistic principle of cross-checking out of the window and bought the tweeted story hook, line and sinker. Most TV channels aired the story at prime-time while most Odia newspapers carried the story on the front page the next morning. The deleted tweet, however, highlights the Naveen Patnaik government’s eagerness to self-praise for its handling of the pandemic. There is little doubt it has done commendable work like creating standalone Covid hospitals and sizeable testing facilities, but claims about its success in arresting the infection have been found to have little resemblance with the real situation.

By Sandeep Sahu in Bhubaneswar