Thumbnail Game: Indian News channels 24 hours running political agenda and spreading communal hatred

- Mohammad Zahid

The graphics shown before the start of a program by the media or its social media handles to attack the minds of the viewers are called thumbnails. Thies thumbnails remains on the full screen or in the background for the entire 1 hour program and keeps attacking the minds of the viewers throughout the show to make them think accordingly.

Actually "thumbnail" means a small representative picture of a large image and it is used to make it easier to see or manage large images. It means that this is the lethal arrow of the entire program which is effective.

That is, a presenter who wants to put a message in the minds of the viewers through his channel, creates it through lethal pictures of his graphics, writes provocative sentences and keeps it on the screen from the promo of the program to the end of the program.

Its effect is that the viewers prepare their minds to see and think according to that thumbnail and since their "mind is arrested", they develop interest in that thumbnail and the handcuffs of their arrested mind get stronger.

To avoid legal troubles, media groups make thumbnails very cleverly and put symbols of Hindi letters after the controversial picture and quote.

Like "Indian Muslims are traitors!" By putting (!) in it, the meaning of the sentence changes and they escape legal troubles because the (!) symbol means "exclamation".

Like "Indian Muslims are traitors?" In this (?) is a question mark, and by putting it, they escape legal troubles.

But the "thumbnail" affects the minds of the viewers "Indian Muslims are traitors" and in this thumbnail, they put the photo of a fierce looking Maulana with a beard and cap with the help of graphics.

And all media organizations and social media news networks play this game of thumbnails. The fastest in this is "Aaj Tak" and the fastest in Aaj Tak is "Anjana Om Kashyap". All these thumbnails with these symbols are false, they contain fake news but the public believes it to be true.

Such thumbnails are so effective that this thumbnail has more impact on someone's mind than Sangeet Ragi and Sudhanshu Trivedi speaking in an hour-long program.

The "question mark" and "exclamation mark" of the thumbnail provide legal protection to any controversial sentence because the meaning of that sentence changes and that controversial sentence directly enters the mind of the viewers without any symbol, viewers ignore such symbols and a large population does not even understand the meaning of these symbols. So now just by looking at the "thumbnail" of a program, you can understand what the channel is trying to put in your mind, and understand that the sentences in the thumbnail with these symbols are false and are made and shown as a conspiracy to create a narrative, to create curiosity in the society. Confirmed and authentic news is without these symbols.

The existence of the channel depends on this whole game and on top of that, the icing on the cake is that "you should not question the media and the anchor". The panelist is scolded and many times is thrown out of the panel live.

Understand again that the media plays this game of thumbnails to create a false narrative and atmosphere, that is why the media has now become more of a "contract killer" than a "godi" and the thumbnail of this contract journalism has made words like "jihad, fatwa, kafir, Ghazwa-e-Hind, talaq, hijab disgusting. Be careful.