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Congress leader Shashi Tharoor clarified that he is not exploring any political options while slamming Indian Express for misreporting
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor clarified that he is “not exploring other political options”. (File photo)
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on Thursday refuted reports which suggested that he was exploring other political options ahead of the Kerala Congress meeting.
Taking to social media platform X, Tharoor slammed The Indian Express for its “baseless and irresponsible” reporting and said that his remarks were misquoted by the publication.
Criticising The Indian Express, Tharoor said that it took “an innocuous statement (I said I had multiple “options to spend my time” in literary pursuits) and made a headline out of it in English that implied I was exploring other political options.”
1/5 A rather important thread that i hope will be read in our country’s journalism schools:The last few days have offered an object lesson in how the news is “made“. @IndianExpress wanted to draw attention to their new Malayalam podcast, so they did two somewhat shameless… pic.twitter.com/K1SAGdfMB3
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) February 27, 2025
“And as usual, the rest of the media reacted to the headline and the political class reacted to the media, and I was left dealing with the mess!” he said.
He added that the publication also ran a fake news story claiming that he had raised the issue of the absence of a leader in Kerala’s Indian National Congress which was even carried by other media outlets and channels.
Tharoor claimed that when he asked the media outlet to check the video of the podcast from where they had picked his quote, it was found that he had not made any such statements after which the paper also published a correction notice “after all the damage has been done”.
Raising the issue of irresponsible journalism, Tharoor questioned “What protection does a public figure have against such” reporting?
He said that the entire story published was baseless and he had neither intended to say nor said what was quoted to him.
Tharoor said that this incident has “added to my profound scepticism about Indian journalism altogether, which has again maintained its usual standards of utter unreliability.”
“This is sadly what our journalistic culture has become: scant regard for accuracy or veracity, lust for clickbait headlines, breathless obsession with the speculative and the trivial. Is it completely futile to hope for better standards of journalism in our country? Not less journalism — just better journalism? Tharoor ended his thread on X.
Recently, The Indian Express had quoted Tharoor as saying in a Malayalam language podcast that if Congress did not require his services, he had other “options”. The publication also claimed that Tharoor raised the issue of the “absence of a leader in Kerala’s Congress”.
- Location :
Kerala, India, India
