Press releases issued by the government are increasingly evasive and obfuscatory, thanks to A.I., writes The Hindu’s senior journalist Sobhana K. Nair. In a diary column published on 6th November, she wrote, “Government press notes […] use various tools of evasion, serving to deliver two contradictory objectives: publicising the government’s achievements while concealing any information on shortcomings. This is an age-old trick that many governments have deployed. She categorises the obfuscation into two subheads, namely, “generic misdirection” and “concealment charm.” Generic misdirection mainly involves lofty “vision language”. The heavy lifting is done by phrases under the “concealment charm”. The modus operandi here is simple: provide no baseline, make no comparisons with the past, and use unquantified qualifiers, non-specific timelines and give no context at all. She writes:
But what got me writing this was a press release announcing Cabinet approval for the Pradhan Mantri Viksit Gram Swaraj Yojana. Even if one is to ignore phrases such as “a next-generation governance transformation initiative”, the press note’s silence on a predecessor scheme, the Rashtriya Gram Swaraj Abhiyan, was noteworthy. Listed under the subhead of beneficiaries were 32 lakh elected representatives. These representatives are going to be trained to assist the government in planning, for which they will receive no remuneration. So how are they beneficiaries?