The sting operation on media houses carried out by news portal Cobrapost has truly exposed the Indian media and their greed for money. Cobrapost, journalist Pushp Sharma went undercover as a Hindutva activist, Acharya Atal, and met people serving in managerial positions at the media groups, allegedly asking them to run a campaign in favour of the BJP. Many of the media houses were allegedly ready to run news and advertisement in exchange of crores of money. Barring few all others approached were allegedly willing to run planned multimedia campaigns to promote Hindutva through customised religious programmes for the first three months, and subsequently via speeches of Hindutva hardliners such as Vinay Katiyar, Uma Bharti and Mohan Bhagwat to polarise voters.
A part of the campaign was also supposed to target opposition leaders such as Rahul Gandhi, Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav. The companies which have been exposed by Cobrapost are Times Group, The New Indian Express, India Today Group, and Zee News, as well as Paytm. So far all of them have strongly refuted the allegations and have issued clarifications. But damage has already has been done and after watching the videos posted by Cobrapost, it will be hard to accept their clarifications. Over the last few years the standards of Indian media have drastically gone down. Most of media houses act like mouth-piece of government and Hindutva group. The hostile anti-minority agenda run by several media groups is believed to be main reason for the rise in hate crime against minority communities. Also instead of holding ruling government responsible for lack of governance, section of media is seen to be strongly backing government and attacking the opposition parties. Therefore not many were surprised with the outcome of sting operation carried out by Cobrapost.