Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

How CJP was covered by news and social media

The news wasn’t necessarily wrong about the events of the protest. It just wasn’t aligned with how most people actually felt about the movement.

If you were online during the recently concluded Cockroach Janta Party-led protests, news coverage likely failed to match your experience on social media. I went looking for why, analysing 1,528 news articles and over 42,000 YouTube comments. I scored each one for tone using VADER, a standard, open-source sentiment-analysis tool. Then I checked the patterns against real attention and engagement data from YouTube API, Wikipedia pageview logs, and Google News search.

The search soon turned into four separate inquiries: who actually told the story, how people really felt about it, which moments truly mattered, and at what moment the story exploded.

Let’s start with the mood since that is a mismatch many have already noticed. If you only read the news, you’d think the whole country was miserable for the entire 70 days between the CJP’s formation and Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation. Real news coverage, scored day by day, stayed grim almost the entire second half of July, even on the day Pradhan resigned. But YouTube comments, scored the same way, stayed upbeat almost every single day from the moment the tear gas shelling started. The same 70 days, but two completely different moods.

The gap only makes sense once you ask who was telling the story. On YouTube, four individual creators reached more people on this topic than every news broadcaster in the country combined. Dhruv Rathee posted eight videos, which amassed 94.5 million views. Ravish Kumar posted 26—almost a daily diary from the leak to the resignation—with 54 million views. Akash Banerjee ran a numbered series on his Deshbhakt channel: 14 parts, 41 million views. And Samdish Bhatia, at 15.5 million views, beat every single legacy news channel’s total. The four creators together got over 205 million views. Major broadcasters’ coverage of the story combined—including Times Now, NDTV, the BBC—added up to 32 million. One man with eight videos beat that number.

The same pattern was........

© ThePrint