The paradox of The Quint’s article on Arunabh Kumar

The Quint put up a piece today titled, “Meet the feminist side of TVF’s Arunabh Kumar, on Facebook”. As the headline suggests, the piece was an unimaginative trawl through Kumar’s timeline. It detailed — in the shoddiest way possible — how Kumar sharing articles with “a clear feminist overtone” is not in sync with him being an alleged sexual molester. The ‘logic’ was a strange combination of naivete and a judgemental attitude that assumes that a company’s professional output must be an accurate reflection of its CEO’s nature.

The piece predictably received a lot of flak on Twitter because of which The Quint decided to change its tack entirely. Without issuing a single clarification or informing its readers that it had updated the article, The Quint did an about-turn.  The revised headline now reads: “Sharing ‘Pro-Women’ Posts on Facebook Doesn’t Make You Pro-Women.” Note that this is the exact opposite of what the earlier ‘meet-the-feminist-side’ headline suggested.

Additionally, The Quint also deleted all the gyaan on the “paradox” between Kumar’s FB persona and his real life. The new copy states that the CEO was probably just playing the emancipated part to suit his commercial interests (read: Girliyapa). Luckily, some good Samaritans have saved screenshots of Quint’s original post.

The problem here is not that Quint decided to change the post or rewrite it, but that it believes it owes its readers no explanations. A simple update stating that it had rewritten the piece in view of the criticism it received would have gone a long way in earning the readers’ respect and trust. You’d think they’d have learnt their lesson after it was outed for pulling down its so-called investigative report on the sahayak system in the Army. Clearly not.