'Concocts A Conclusion Nowhere Present In Our Report': Lead Author Of Study On Leicester Violence Calls Out Bloomberg For Pushing 'False Narrative'

The lead author of the Leicester violence report released by Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) has slammed Bloomberg for distorting the report and its findings.

Bloomberg had covered the NCRI report in an article with the headline "India-Based Twitter Accounts Fanned UK Unrest, researchers say".

"As a lead author & researcher on the Leicester report released by NCRI, I’d like to set the record straight after a Bloomberg headline has been picked up and circulated prolifically by other outlets. It’s a distortion of our report & findings," Prasiddha Sudhakar, the lead author of the report, said in a tweet.

"The headline imposed by Bloomberg editors is severely editorial and not rooted in the data presented in our research".

"This is important since a large majority of news consumers read only the headline of news stories," she added.

She further said that the headline neither a "cherry-picked sentence from our study", nor does it "misstate a finding therein".

"Instead, it concocts a conclusion nowhere present in our report," Sudhakar said.

She said that the Bloomberg chosing a headline that continues to push a false narrative that the NCRI report debunked is "indicative of systemic misreporting of the Hindu diaspora and India that infects Western media".

Sudaharkar said that by adding the phrase 'researchers say' in the headline, Bloomberg made researchers responsible for the central claim of its article's headline.

She added that the NCRI report "exhaustively documents" the way on-the-ground riots in Leicester were mobilized by local social media accounts and not those in India.

"Our report notes that an Indian SM echo chamber amplified blame on Muslims, where some escalated to anti-Muslim rhetoric. There’s no evidence to suggest they “fanned UK unrest,” as Bloomberg puts it," she said.

"Our findings suggest that a "Hindutva bogeyman" was constructed locally to mobilize violence. Violence against Hindus and temples was justified under the guise of responding to “Hindutva extremism"," she added.

Sudhakar said that the Bloomberg headline was picked up by Pakistani, Qatari state media and used as part of information operations to spread anti-Hindu misinformation.