Against the backdrop of a concerted effort to whitewash the roles of The Daily Star and Prothom Alo—Bangladesh’s leading English- and Bengali-language dailies, respectively, owned by the country’s powerful Transcom Group—in propping up and sustaining Hasina’s murderous regime, we attempted to document some of the pro-Hasina propaganda techniques deployed by these two newspapers.

We limited our research to the Transcom dailies because they are often cited as the most reliable news outlets that speak truth to power. Our operating assumption is that if we can demonstrate that these two newspapers—supposedly the best—have aided the Hasina regime, then explaining the condition of the rest of the media outlets becomes unnecessary.

Of course, The Daily Star and Prothom Alo, Bangladesh’s most influential English and Bengali language dailies, were critical of Hasina from time to time. And a pro-Transcom research would focus on those criticisms without placing them within the broader context in which they appear.

Media manipulation works in two different ways. The first one is about dictating what people should think about.

By setting the agenda—deciding which issues are considered newsworthy and which are not, and, if an issue has news value, how much news value that issue carries—a news-peddling platform tries to limit public discourse to the content it publishes, in addition to subtly guiding people’s perception of urgency.

The issues highlighted on the main pages, in gigantic headlines, and across columns are prioritized over issues mentioned only in passing—somewhere in the middle pages, in tiny headings, and within a single column.

All media houses, irrespective of ideological differences and/or credibility, are “guilty” of this. Thus, the way a newspaper sets an agenda reveals its subtle biases.

The second and relatively more detectable form of manipulation is the way the media frames an issue. The very language—or its absence—that a newspaper uses tells us how that newspaper wants its readers to view the issue it is reporting on.

In the course of our research, we investigated these two aspects instead of calling out their blatant lies, of which there was no shortage either.

For example, on February 6, 2013, Prothom Alo published a photo of a mob gathered at the Shahbag intersection calling for the death penalty for Abdul Quader Molla, a Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami leader. The caption of the photo claimed that thousands of people were present, even though the photo shows a couple of hundred people at best.

An example of a blatant The Daily Star lie is its reports on Zakir Naik in 2016.

On July 5 that year, the daily published a front-page report titled “2 ‘attackers’ followed radical preacher, ‘IS recruiters.’” In that report, the daily categorically stated that the terrorists responsible for the Holey Artisan attack earlier that month were radicalized over the years by consuming materials created by Naik, among others. It also erroneously mentioned that Naik was banned from entering Malaysia for his “radical” views.

When Naik hit back against this accusation, the daily claimed on July 10, 2016, that “The Daily Star … did not report that any terrorist was inspired by Zakir Naik to kill innocent people.”

The Daily Star’s website has since removed the July 5 report, although, of course, it could not alter the printed archives in libraries in an Orwellian manner.

Even though The Daily Star later distanced itself from its unsubstantiated claim that Naik had radicalized the terrorists involved in the Holey Artisan attack, this report was instrumentalized by Hasina’s prime backer, India, to initiate an Islamophobic witch hunt against Naik and his associates, forcing him into exile in Malaysia and leading to the banning of his TV channel, Peace TV, in Bangladesh.

While these instances of blatant lies indicate the Transcom dailies’ complicity in social engineering and possibly in transnational repression, the focus of our research was on identifying systemic and subtler patterns.

One such pattern can be found in Prothom Alo’s March 5, 2013, front-page report on the killings of four individuals in Satkhira and Sirajganj.

The headline of the report, if translated into English, reads, “No end to Jamaat violence: 4 more dead in Satkhira and Sirajganj.” The title gives the impression that Jamaat, then a key ally of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, was responsible for these four deaths.

However, somewhere in the full report, in tiny font, it is mentioned that the police opened fire on Jamaat protesters in Sirajganj and that 15-year-old Mahfuj “died” in that “clash.” Likewise, in Satkhira, the detail that security forces opened fire on protesters “throwing bricks and stones,” resulting in three deaths, was buried deep within the report.

The obvious manipulation technique was applied through the title, which was grossly misleading. It was state violence, not Jamaat violence, that killed the four protesters, including a 15-year-old.

More interesting is how Prothom Alo obscured police responsibility by omitting the fact that it was a police bullet that killed the 15-year-old boy in Sirajganj, while presenting the murderous men in uniform in Satkhira as acting in self-defence.

Equally intriguing is the way Prothom Alo packaged the crackdowns on civilian protesters as “clashes.”

Within the limited scope of our research, it was not possible for us to identify all the instances in which this particular set of manipulation techniques was deployed.

However, we identified more than a dozen such cases between 2012 and 2024 in reports published by the Transcom dailies.

On March 28, 2021, The Daily Star used the exact same set of techniques in narrating the story of five individuals killed by police in Brahmanbaria. The headline read: “Hefajat mayhem on: For 2nd day, the Islamist group stages violent protests; hospital sources say 5 shot dead in B’baria….”

As in the previous case, The Daily Star also tried to present the police as acting in self-defence. It quoted an unnamed eyewitness as saying that the protesters had first attacked the police with bricks.

Such unnamed quotations cannot be taken at face value, as the newspapers in question often put lies in the mouths of even named narrators. For instance, on May 7, 2013, a front-page “news analysis” titled “Shapla Chattar and Act of Houdini” by Shahrier Khan cited The Daily Star’s own journalists to claim that only 13 protesters had “died” in the “violence” on May 5, 2013.

The pattern we identified can be summarised as follows: a misleading headline that shifts the blame from the Hasina regime to the victims portrayed as violent; no direct mention of who killed whom, thereby concealing police brutality; and justification of police brutality as acts of self-defence, often by citing unverifiable sources.

Various combinations of all or some of these techniques have been used to prepare reports that fit this pattern.

Editor’s note: The Citizen Initiative, a civil society organisation, partnered with the Historical Transparency Society and the Anti-Fascist Coalition to commission research on the role of two Bangladeshi dailies in propping up the draconian Hasina regime.

Supported by a research team comprising Tasneem Tabassum Zahir, Labiba Binte Wali, and Ishrak Ahmed from Dhaka University, and Farhan Saleh Rafid from Northwestern University in Qatar, Md Ashraf Aziz Ishrak Fahim presented the findings at an event titled “Hasina’s Goebbels: Manufacturing Consent for Fascism,” which focused on the propaganda techniques deployed by The Daily Star and Prothom Alo.

This first instalment in the series explores how the two dailies erased and justified police killings, and victim-blamed.

Editor’s note: The Citizen Initiative, a civil society organisation, partnered with the Historical Transparency Society and the Anti-Fascist Coalition to commission research on the role of two Bangladeshi dailies in propping up the draconian Hasina regime.

Supported by a research team comprising Tasneem Tabassum Zahir, Labiba Binte Wali, and Ishrak Ahmed from Dhaka University, and Farhan Saleh Rafid from Northwestern University in Qatar, Md Ashraf Aziz Ishrak Fahim presented the findings at an event titled “Hasina’s Goebbels: Manufacturing Consent for Fascism,” which focused on the propaganda techniques deployed by The Daily Star and Prothom Alo.

This first instalment in the series explores how the two dailies erased and justified police killings, and victim-blamed.

Md Ashraf Aziz Ishrak Fahim is a Political Analyst and Cultural Crtic