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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

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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

For TV news channels, BJP won because of ‘Modi magic’, ‘Modi wave’, ‘Modi ka Kamaal’

Times Now anchors celebrated the BJP victory in West Bengal with a Masala Mandate food stall in the studio. On live television, they proceeded to chomp on some jhalmuri.

How was Mamata Banerjee’s TMC ‘decimated’, ‘demolished’ and ‘defeated’ by the BJP in West Bengal?

Here are 10 factors for the BJP’s win, seven reasons for Mamata’s loss, and all the data that AI or the human mind can generate for you to play psephologist.

The Muslim vote was divided by 10 per cent, the women’s vote for the BJP grew by 85 per cent, the BJP’s vote share in Greater Kolkata increased by 8 per cent, Hindutva accounted for 25 per cent (although it was 22 per cent in the South and 3 per cent less in the North) and double engine sarkar promise appealed to 67 per cent of voters. And what about Modi’s magnetism? Well, that’s incalculable.

Got it? Of course you haven’t. While this was a ‘mock’ example, it sums up the news media’s dependence on data to explain the election results.

Television news channels with their magic screens and newspapers with their fine print flooded us with numbers, charts, graphs, percentage points, and colourful maps—all presented in convoluted sentences. This drowned the election results in a sea of details.

You don’t believe me? Here are some examples.

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) saw “Ineligible’ voters exceed win margins in 25 BJP seats’ (The Economic Times), but ‘TMC won 13 out of 20 seats with highest voter deletions’ (The Indian Express).

“The net SIR deletions in the state are 8.9 million, of which 2.7 million were deleted during the adjudication process…the decline in votes polled by TMC is close to at least the adjudication deletions,” reported Hindustan Times (‘Did SIR exercise win West Bengal for the BJP?’)

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