News agency Indo-Asian News Service has suspended a journalist after it published a report on Wednesday evening that contained an expletive in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s name, The Print reported. The news agency took down the report within an hour and asked media outlets to “guard against its publication”.
The word appeared in a news story about a Cabinet meeting on measures to boost farm incomes. The meeting was chaired by Modi.
Some media clients of IANS had published the story by the time it was withdrawn, and have now taken it down.
“IANS deeply regrets the wholly inadvertent incursion of an unparliamentary reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in one of its reports yesterday,” IANS Managing Editor Hardev Sanotra said in a statement to The Print.
“The error is unacceptable and unconscionable,” he added. “As soon as it was discovered, the report was pulled off from the wires and a corrected story issued. Meanwhile, the reporter concerned has been suspended with immediate effect pending an urgent ongoing investigation. A show-cause notice has also been issued to the concerned editor.”
Sanotra said this was perhaps the “first [such instance] in over 25-year history of our organisation”.
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