Union home minister Amit Shah admitted that he had turned COVID positive through a tweet on Sunday.
Across the country, the news is the lead story in most newspapers, if not second lead, but the display in some newspapers is revealing of how sections of the media are increasingly mindful of how they are perceived even in reporting routine news.
Nearly no newspaper manages to get a doctor to confirm the report, and there is no questioning of the minister admitting himself to the private Medanta hospital where government doctors from AIIMS will examine him.
And almost all reporting on Shah’s interactions with colleagues and others in the days prior to his infection is based on unnnamed government sources.
Shah, of course, had grandly declared just a few days ago that “the world is seeing that if a successful battle has been fought anywhere across the globe against the coronavirus it is in India under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
Spot the tip-toeing.
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IJR 