'Internet Hindus' fighting mainstream media

BANGALORE, INDIA: Public opinion hasn't always been a neutral opinion of public. Since ages, the media and opinion leaders have played a high handed role in forming what we call public opinion.

In a bid to purify the concept of public opinion by cleaning it of all biased elements, a new community on Internet, named 'Internet Hindus', is slowly leading a war against those section of media which, they say, is 'one-sided' and not showing the 'other side' of the story.

'Internet Hindus' are people socially active on blogs, forums, social networking websites, microblogging websites etc that are quite vocal about their views on Hinduism, media, politics and nation as a whole, according to a blog post called Vu-point.

The term 'Internet Hindu' has little religious connotation. It is, instead, said to be a community which searches for the 'other side' of what is reported about India and its politics.

Giving an example as to how a 'normal Hindu' slowly transforms to an Internet Hindu, the blog post quotes a person (anonymous) as saying: “I was a 'normal' Hindu about one year back. I used to watch news channels extensively and was pretty much aware about the country and politics. Then I joined the 'Jaago Re' community on Orkut since I wanted to get my Voter card made. There someone asked me to post an article in the 'NDTV' community since he was banned from there and couldn't do that. Subsequently, I joined the community and got to know some more facts. Later I joined the 'Indian politics' community and finally 'India' community.

The anonymous figure added, “After many months of long reading of various articles I got to know the completely different side of the picture. How the news articles are twisted, how the 'breaking news' are completely different from what happened, how the headlines are made misleading to gain TRPs etc.”

There are several people who believe that 'Internet Hindus' can fight what they called 'manipulation of facts by media'. A person named Vikas, commenting under Vu-point blog says, “Why can't..see our strength (is) growing. I hate news channels as they are one-sided. But I can say if the strength grows like this then soon we will start a news channel to show the truth.”