Press freedom index puts focus on newsrooms telling India’s hardest stories

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 7, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/05/07/press-freedom-index-puts-focus-on-newsrooms-telling-indias-hardest-stories

Every year we are informed that India is sinking lower on the World Press Freedom Index put together by Reporters Without Borders. India now stands at 157 out of 180 countries. “So what?” says the government. “We know,” say journalists who have felt the brunt of this decline.

It is worth considering though what “press freedom” means for those engaged in the media – print, broadcast and digital – and especially the journalists who work outside the formal economy of the media as independent journalists.

Press freedom is dependent on many things, including laws made by the government. But protection under law is not enough, even in a democracy as we have experienced in India during the Emergency when all pretence of press freedom was abandoned in the name of national security. Even today, especially in the last decade, the same trope of national security is used to imprison journalists or to bring in curbs that in effect curtail the right of journalists to information.  

In fact, this is precisely what the RSF report highlights, the impact of the November 2025 rules the government published for the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023). “This new legal framework”, the report states, “directly undermines the fundamentals of journalism by restricting access to, processing of, and publication of certain types of information that could be of interest to the public, starting with administrative documents, public archives, and all other information that could implicate public officials or institutions entrusted with a mission of general interest”.

Apart from such direct intervention by the government that undercuts the very concept of a free media, we also see how this is further emasculated when a powerful executive teams up with private money power.

In India, big money and the executive have been known to come together to suppress reporting on issues that would be uncomfortable to both for decades. This trend consolidated post 1991 and liberalisation when the media, then mostly print media, became commercialised and news was redefined as something that would sell the “product”. That is when we saw the amplification of some and the erasure of others from the news pages. The rich, the politically powerful, celebrities were “news”; the poor, the working classes, the people living on the peripheries were not worth featuring.

That trend has now become an almost accepted feature where, as I argued in an earlier column, the dominant narrative suggested by the government is echoed uncritically by the media (barring a few exceptions). The economically powerful owners go along with this either because their politics matches that of the ruling party or because they are aware of the cost of not doing so given the extent to which the Modi government has weaponised the use of agencies to deal with any opposition.

In sum, India’s declining status on the World Press Freedom Index is no surprise.

Yet, we must consider who pays the price for this decline in media freedom. 

The brunt of the decline noted by the RSF is felt by those journalists working outside the frame of mainstream media. In fact, if there is journalism being done the way it should in a democracy, where your camera or your pen seeks out the voiceless, where you report irrespective of whose toes you tread on – big business or big government – because you believe it is a story that must be told, it is the growing tribe of independent journalists in India who are doing this.

They are not backed by any union or association that will come to their aid if they are arrested, bullied, attacked physically or virtually. In fact, even the big publications that they write for often back off when these journalists get embroiled in a court case initiated by a functionary of the ruling party. 

Despite this, it is encouraging that scores of independent journalists are not giving up. They continue to report and expose both business and government, and often both. To give just one example, the story of the environmentally devastating projects being planned in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have been reported mainly by independent journalists for years (read here and here). They finally got noticed by the mainstream, albeit momentarily, when Congress leader Rahul Gandhi happened to visit the islands recently.

The other barometer of press freedom is what the media chooses to downplay or even ignore and why.

Coincidentally, World Press Freedom Day is two days after May 1, universally celebrated as International Workers’ Day, marking the struggle of workers for an 8-hour workday. I doubt if many people, especially the younger generation, are even aware of this struggle and its significance.  

But the coincidence also reminds us of the absence of reporting on trade unions, those that have survived despite liberalisation and the dominant contract system that most workers are compelled to accept. These workers are not invisible. They are everywhere, building our infrastructure, constructing private buildings, running the gig economy, working in farms. And then there are those who are virtually invisible, the men and women who work in the homes of the better off Indians at shockingly low pay.

These Indians make it past the barrier of what is considered newsworthy only when they organise, protest, clash with the police, get beaten up and are jailed as the recent protests in Noida highlighted. Though these protests were covered by print, much of the reporting was done by small independent platforms on social media.  Such as this where a worker tells a reporter, “We put our children to sleep hungry. We hold them to our chests and sing lullabies, so that they don’t remember their hunger.” 

We heard women and men speak about the shocking conditions at their places of work; not just how little they were paid (less than the minimum wage) but the mockery of the annual “increment” that they received. They spoke of how their pay was cut if they fell sick or had to travel for an emergency. And that after years of working in a factory, or as construction labour, there was no compensation if the factory closed or the contract work ended (read here). 

We also heard from domestic workers who are unorganised and who are in no position to demand higher wages as there are always people available to work for less. Such is the level of desperation. But to hear the stories of the women who speak of employers who haven’t given them a raise, who cut their wages if they absent themselves from work because of ill health or family emergencies, reminds us that this is India 2026, where those who labour still struggle for a living wage. 

Finding meaningful reporting on the working class is like searching for a needle in a haystack these days. Yet, there was a time, when major newspapers like The Hindu, Times of India, Indian Express had a labour reporter, someone whose job it was to report on the conditions of the working classes. That position disappeared around the time that news was redefined as anything that will attract eyeballs.

As a result, our so-called “free” media in India is dedicated only to reporting on those with economic and political heft while the bulk of this country remains outside the definition of “news”.  

It is significant that the RSF report zeroes in on the changes made by the Modi government to digital laws that will restrict reporting by the independent journalists who are telling stories that mainstream will not report. Perhaps we should see this as a sign of hope, that despite what appears to be their limited reach, the combined presence of so many feisty independent journalists has made a powerful government uncomfortable. 

India’s media problem in 2 headlines: ‘Anti-women’ opposition, ‘mastermind’ Nida Khan

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on April 23, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/04/23/indias-media-problem-in-2-headlines-anti-women-opposition-mastermind-nida-khan

In the last two weeks, we have seen how easily Indian mainstream media echoes the “manufactured narrative” that the Modi government and its surrogates seek to amplify.

Let’s start with what the media has chosen to call the “Women’s Bill” when in fact what they are referring to is the 131st Constitutional Amendment Bill to introduce delimitation of parliamentary and assembly constituencies based on the 2011 census. 

The reason given by the government for formulating this law was that it would help push through one-third reservation of seats for women in parliament and legislative assemblies. The so-called “Women’s Bill” reserving one-third seats in all legislative assemblies had already been passed in 2023. It was not notified, and therefore not implemented.

Given these facts, the government did not explain why, when a law like this was already on the statute, and could have been implemented before the 2024 general elections, it remained in cold storage. Incidentally, that “Women’s Bill” got the support of most opposition parties.

The government also did not care to explain why it had to call an urgent three-day session of parliament in the middle of assembly elections in several states to push through this bill and why it could not wait until later.

These are the obvious questions the media needed to ask. It did not. All major media houses would also have known that the Women’s Reservation Bill of Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam had already been passed in 2023.  

Yet, when this rushed session of Parliament was convened, and a united opposition defeated the constitutional amendment which needed two-thirds of Parliament to vote in favour, every major newspaper, barring The Hindu, headlined the defeat as one relating to the “Women’s Bill”.  Inadvertently, or deliberately, these headlines played into the narrative that the Modi government had sought to amplify through this process: that they were committed to “Nari Shakti” but that the opposition was not, a useful trope to amplify in the elections to the Bengal and Tamil Nadu state assemblies.

One could argue that the front-page headline in a newspaper does not necessarily represent its editorial stance which is reflected in the editorial page. Yet, a front page is not made by junior sub-editors, especially the choice of the lead story. Senior editors check and approve it. And we also know, given diminished attention spans, that most people scan the headlines and perhaps read a couple of paragraphs. Rarely would the lay reader take the time to go into the details of this or any other issue.

Therefore, there is a reason that headlines matter, and that they should accurately represent events and developments and neither exaggerate, nor give the wrong and inaccurate information, as in this case.

This article in Alt News, especially the latter half, gives you illustrations of what appeared the day after the vote in Parliament. Readers can judge for themselves the difference between a headline in The Hindu that read: “United opposition defeats Delimitation Bill” and one in Indian Express that stated: “Opposition stands, women’s Bill falls.” As mentioned earlier, the “Women’s Bill” did not fall. It had already been passed in 2023. What should have been headline news on that day is that the government chose to notify the actual “Women’s Bill” on April 16, a day before the vote in Parliament on April 17. By then it was clear that the Constitutional Amendment would not pass.

The TCS case,

The other equally troubling incident is the way in which media handled what has now come to be known as the TCS sexual harassment case.

The story began virtually unnoticed on April 9 when reports appeared around sexual harassment at a company in Nashik. Few details were known.

In the days to follow, as this article by senior journalist Sukumar Muralidharan outlines in OffBeatConcerns, the story was picked by several media portals close to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Within a couple of weeks, it had caught the attention of TV news channels. Terms like the usual “love jihad” and now “corporate jihad” began to be used as the office under the radar was run by the Tata Consulting Services (TCS).

This story by Prateek Goyal in Newslaundry sets out in detail how the case developed in Nashik.  When asked about media coverage around this case, a senior police officer told the reporter: “Media people have made so many stories. No one is interested in what we say but only in what they want to hear.” 

While the story is still unfolding, and the police have arrested several men and declared a woman named in one FIR as “absconding”, it is the way the media played up the role of this one woman that illustrates not just the crass insensitivity of some mainstream media houses but also, as in the case of the “Women’s Bill”, how readily they amplify a narrative that the BJP and its supporters have been plugging.

The woman in question is Nida Khan, an employee of TCS.  The media, especially television news, repeatedly used her photograph and claimed she was the head of Human Resources and the “mastermind” of a conspiracy to convert fellow workers to Islam. 

By the time TCS clarified that Nida Khan was not the head of HR but was an employee in another department, the damage had been done. A young woman, expecting her first child, who had recently transferred to Mumbai from Nashik, became the face of the alleged scandal at the TCS unit in Nashik. Her attempt to get anticipatory bail has failed. 

Worse still, TCS, which has gone to great lengths to assert that it had a system to deal with complaints from its employees, suspended this young woman without doing its own independent inquiry into the case. 

As of now, it is not clear what will happen to Nida Khan. It is clear, however, that the trial by the media has ruined her life. And it is highly unlikely that any of the newspapers or channels that used her photograph and repeated the falsehood will apologise. Meanwhile, the BJP and its supporters have no complaints.

This incident in the TCS office in Nashik, how it developed, the role of the Maharashtra police and the role of the media must also be viewed against the background of the developments in Maharashtra where a controversial anti-conversion law has been passed. As this article by Kunal Purohit in Article 14 points out, conspiracy theories about “love jihad” have been assiduously promoted by BJP supporters in the build-up to the enactment of the Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Act, 2026. Under this law, even if there is no complaint, the police can initiate action if it suspects that there are attempts at religious conversion. 

 

Seen together, what we have witnessed is the ease with which the government and the party in power can ensure that their choice of manufactured narrative is deliberately or inadvertently amplified by mainstream media.