Institutional life throws up instances which come to define the institutions for posterity and give them identities which are tough to shake off. Indian media has given us enough evidences of bias, hypocrisy, remorselessness even on being caught red-handed on some instances etc. But they breached many barriers of decency this time and reduced themselves to trolls with a full-time job!

Raghav Chopra, whose profiles say he is an editor at CNN IBN and is the operational head of Pradesh18News, shared an image of the PM of India touching Saudi royalty’s feet.

The tweet now seems to be deleted but it’s screenshot is being widely circulated on social media.

Needless to say that the above picture is a photoshopped version of the original image where PM Mr Modi was touching the feet of his senior and mentor in BJP, Shri LK Advani.

On being pointed out, Raghav has since protected his account on twitter and deleted his Facebook account. There has been deserved outrage on the issue. The outrage was due since the PM is on an important diplomatic visit to Saudi Arabia.

I request Shri @ArunJaitley, Shri @Ra_THORe , Editors Guild & Broadcasting Journalist association to take strict action against @AarSee. — Maheish Girri (@MaheishGirri) April 3, 2016

Our media has in the past tried every diversion, digression and manufactured needless controversies when the PM was on diplomatic visits or hosting dignitaries, be it the LV shawl controversy, the 15 lakh suit controversy etc. Key points of the visits, government’s achievements have been lost in the kerfuffle after these deliberate controversies. But this time, a new abyss has been reached.

Only a few days back the entire media circle was ablaze with outrage over how “fake videos” were being used to malign poor Kanhaiyya and push him into imprisonment. They relegated the court’s wisdom and judged that Kanhaiyya was being “fixed”, a commoner who merely shared the videos was subsequently maligned and hounded by the highest and mightiest in Indian media. There has always been a lot of sermonizing from the media over the need to speak the truth and how social media “trolls” are undermining truth and sanity with their photoshops and viciousness.

Well this time the media is itself caught using all the means they accuse trolls of using!