India’s fog of war: Print media treads cautiously, TV media loses the plot

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 9, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/05/09/indias-fog-of-war-print-media-treads-cautiously-tv-media-loses-the-plot

Illustration of an anchor shouting through a television while viewers cower on their couch. |Manjul

Subscribe nowIndia today is enveloped in a fog, the fog of war. It is so thick that we can neither see nor hear what is going on. We must wait patiently for someone in “authority” to tell us what is happening.

India today is enveloped in a fog, the fog of war. It is so thick that we can neither see nor hear what is going on. We must wait patiently for someone in “authority” to tell us what is happening.

Ever since the launch of Operation Sindoor on the night of May 6-7, when Indian armed forces launched nine precision strikes that targeted what were suspected to be terror outfits in Pakistan, Indian media – or at least some sections of it – has gone ballistic.

As for Indian TV news channels (which gave up on doing any kind of serious journalism years ago), they had already launched their own “operation” against Pakistan without waiting for the Indian government to act. Indeed, within days of the terror attack in Pahalgam where 26 people were killed, TV anchors were not just demanding war, but even demonstrating how it ought to be conducted. (It’s worthwhile, even now, to watch this episode of TV Newsance by Manisha Pande to get a sense of the madness on television screens.)

The official start of the clash between India and Pakistan has now given these channels additional ammunition and the madness has reached a higher pitch. Disinformation, misinformation, drama and ear-splitting decibel levels are par for the course. If you watch Indian TV, you might say this is normal. But is it, when the country is virtually at war with its neighbour, when the government is putting out all kinds of advisories about misinformation and fake news? 

Why is it that no such advisory has been directed at these channels, not even a gentle rebuke, when the government has the power under existing laws to do so? Is it because the government finds it convenient to let them rant in contrast to its official briefings that are restrained and low-key? Is it important for this government to keep up the ultra-nationalist fervour without seeming to be doing so directly? These are questions that we must ask, even if the mere act of asking questions now is considered “anti-national”. 

On the day after Operation Sindoor, barring headlines and display, the news coverage in all major newspapers was almost identical. What was missing was the story of the price being paid by the Kashmiris living near the Line of Control. An exception was the Indian Express, which had a story on its front page giving the names and ages of each one of those killed in the firing across the border.  

But the press could have given a human face to this war by asking why, if the government knew that it was mounting this operation, was there inadequate effort to make sure the most vulnerable, the people living on the border, had shelters, or somewhere else where they could go? 

And why should the Indian media not ask these questions, as Kashmir Times has done? Despite its constraints, Kashmir Times has been putting out daily reports on the lives of the Kashmiris affected along the Line of Control. If you visit some of the villages in Uri district, you can see the other side clearly, across a deep gorge with the Neelam River that divides the two sides of Kashmir. People on both sides face cross-border firing whenever there’s a problem between our two countries. Yet, so often, their stories are never told, or only in passing. The real price of war is paid by such ordinary people.

Apart from not reporting on the casualties along the LoC, the print media is also not asking legitimate questions. For instance, when the defence minister states that 100 terrorists have been killed in Operation Sindoor, we need to know who they are, where they were, and whether they were at any of the nine sites that were targeted in Pakistan. Yet so far, such a question has not been asked, and it is highly unlikely if it ever will be. 

There are other questions, including Pakistan’s claims on Indian fighter jets, and photographs of alleged debris. So far, there has been no official response.

Clearly, print media has decided to tread cautiously because they know that unlike TV channels, this government is not going to be charitable towards them if they report without official confirmation. Any speculation, or source-based story is likely to be regarded as antagonistic.

And with the Indian government’s action of blocking the sites of even established Pakistan media such as Dawn or GeoNews, Indian journalists have to depend on international media houses like the BBC or news agencies like Reuters to get a sense of what is being said and reported on the other side. Surely, this is something that the media in India ought to be able to access. 

Clearly, print media has decided to tread cautiously because they know that unlike TV channels, this government is not going to be charitable towards them if they report without official confirmation. Any speculation, or source-based story is likely to be regarded as antagonistic.

Also, while Indian TV news continues unchecked with its dangerous theatrics, 8,000 accounts on the social media platform X have been blocked on the request of the Indian government. Ironically, X’s own Global Government Affairs account which reported that these accounts had been blocked without a clear reason for why this should be done, has also been blocked.

Strangely too, accounts of senior Kashmiri journalists like Muzamil Jamil from Indian Express, who is not particularly active on X, and editor of Kashmir Times, Anuradha Bhasin, have been blocked. Also, the Kerala-based digital platform Maktoob Media, even though it is reporting on the ongoing exchange between India and Pakistan much as mainstream media is doing. 

At the time of publishing this story, The Wire announced that its website was blocked in India as well. 

When strategic affairs are involved, especially between India and Pakistan, the media is flooded with comments by “experts”. On television news, the expertise of some of some of these men, and they are all men, can be questioned. But they provide the optics for the shouting matches that are always the norm, and more so when the issue is India and Pakistan.

Fortunately, print remains more sober, and one can read, or listen to, counter-terrorism experts who speak with the knowledge and insight needed to clear the fog of disinformation.

One such is Ajai Sahni. In this long, but frank, podcast with senior journalist Nirupama Subramanian for Frontline, Sahni speaks about how much of the government’s response after the Pahalgam terror attack is pure optics, and what if anything can be done to deal with the reality of cross-border terror. Without mincing words, he says that Pahalgam was a policy failure, a propaganda failure, and a political failure.

In the fog of war, disinformation from all sides is the virtual norm. We have seen that in abundance in the last few days. The night of May 6/7 will be remembered for the deluge that followed Operation Sindoor. Yet, it was the much maligned Mohammed Zubair of Alt News who systematically separated the wheat from the chaff so to speak, and revealed how handles pretending to be Indians, were Pakistanis sharing old videos to show the extent of the attack by India. Later he also showed how handles in India, and even TV channels, were using old videos to show what was going on that night.

The scourge of social media did not exist in the previous major clashes between India and Pakistan (although there is hope that this one will not escalate into a major clash). Today, it is something that is virtually impossible to control. As a result, responsible media platforms without independent sources of verification are left with no option but to stick to what is confirmed officially, even if this is not the whole story. However, even within these constraints, there are stories about people, and the impact of conflict, that need to be recorded and told. 

All this started in Kashmir, when 26 people were brutally murdered on April 22 by gun-toting men identified as terrorists. It is a region that has now been pushed back into a time of tension and sorrow. Do read this sensitive and moving piece by Mirza Waheed, Kashmiri journalist and well-known writer, in The Guardian lamenting that Kashmiri voices are still missing. 

 in The Guardian lamenting that Kashmiri voices are still missing.  

Bengaluru, Pak floods coverage exposes gaps in media’s understanding of climate, development issues

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 8, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/09/08/bengaluru-pak-floods-coverage-exposes-gaps-in-medias-understanding-of-climate-development-issues

In this season of floods, some floods matter more than others. You can see this in the amount of time and space the media accords to some floods, while virtually ignoring others.

Then we have the entrenched politics of water and land, as well as factors that transcend state and national boundaries such as climate change. We in the media should be addressing these politics and the reality of climate change, while covering the current spate of floods in the region which cannot be categorised simply as “natural disasters”.

The floods that matter, and which we report in detail, are those in the big cities. This entails minimum costs for media houses as the crisis is literally on their doorsteps. Those affected are also part of the “market” of these media houses. Floods further afield, in the northeast for instance, do not engage mainstream media in India to this extent.

The coverage of the recent flooding of large parts of Bengaluru, which undoubtedly was big news given the city’s global connections, exposed another aspect of the coverage of floods. While the visuals of upscale villas in gated communities and floating high-end automobiles might make for dramatic footage, we saw little of the devastation caused to the urban poor parked just outside the gates of these colonies.

Also, you had to look hard to find reportage explaining the backstory of why Bengaluru is in such a mess. In fact, such a disaster has been predicted for long by environmentalists and urban planners. They have exposed and campaigned against the destruction of natural lakes around the city, the construction on lake beds and misplaced urban development plans that cater to the demands of private developers. This, and an inadequate drainage system, has had a direct impact on Bengaluru’s ability to cope with excessive rainfall.

The Bengaluru flooding story has been seen in practically every major metro in India, and even in smaller cities and towns. This is decidedly not a “natural” disaster. It is the consequence of how the politics of land, inextricably linked to city and state politics, plays out. Urban development plans are made, only to be ignored. And environmental concerns go unheeded despite the campaigning of determined civil society groups. Practically no political party makes these concerns a part of its agenda. Profits, not prudence, is the mantra all of them follow.

For the media, these recent floods in Bengaluru underline not only the abysmal lack of planning and development in that city, but the gap in the media’s understanding of the larger issues behind this disaster.

For one, understanding the consequences of land use, and the politics behind it, as well as how natural resources such as water are used, or abused, needs to be the foundation for city reporting. Journalists given this beat must understand this politics to be able to report incisively not just on events, like floods, but also on why they occur.

Second, reporters need to understand that the worse-affected in these “unnatural” disasters are those with the least clout in how decisions are made in city development. So, in Bengaluru too, several urban poor communities lost everything they possessed in the floods. Once the waters recede, and there is talk of compensation, the well-heeled will recover from insurance claims. The poor will be left with nothing, especially as in many instances they either do not possess, or have lost, the documentation to establish that they are “legal”.

As urban planner and civil engineer Vishwanath S explains in this interview to Scroll:

“There are a lot of informal areas around the Information Technology hub that have been affected. These areas are not being documented or being shown. They may or may not be legal slums, which is more concerning as that means there is a good chance they would not even have the inadequate drainage systems in place. Then there is the periphery of the state which is being affected, which is not being documented and shown either. The focus has been on the apartments worth Rs 9 crore or Rs 13 crore or the villas which have been flooded.”

Equally important, journalists reporting on cities must comprehend how climate change is affecting our cities in a very direct way, not just by way of extreme weather events. It will help reporters dig deeper to understand the backstory, so that readers or viewers develop a better understanding of why such disasters are occurring so frequently.

Moving on from Bengaluru, the much bigger crisis is what has occurred in what we love to refer to as our “neighbouring country”, that is Pakistan. The scale of the devastation is hard to imagine. The visuals seen on international TV channels, and on social media, are frightening. Just visualising one third of a country under water is tough. Yet that is the reality in Pakistan today.

Although there has been some coverage of the devastation next door in the Indian media, it is not enough. The reason it needs to be much more detailed is obvious. India has not just a shared history with Pakistan, but also a shared geography. As the current director of Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission, Farah Zia points out in this perceptive article in Indian Express: “We’re in it together. ‘We’, as in India and Pakistan. Our weather systems like our history are joined at the hip.”

What is also interesting is how, as in India, in Pakistan too, the media ignored the early warning signs of the floods, because they occurred as early as July in Balochistan which, as Farah Zia writes,“… is not on the media’s radar anyway. It only got attention when an army helicopter on a flood relief and rescue mission, with high-profile personnel on board, crashed on August 2. The province also got the media’s attention once the death toll crossed 100.”

Historian Ammar Ali makes a similar point when he writes in this article in Jacobin that Islamabad-based political commentators were preoccupied writing about politics even as the first information about the devastation was coming through on social media. “Soon, floods began overwhelming areas in Sindh and south Punjab. The first time floods became the main headline on a Pakistani channel was August 23. By this time, more than twenty million people had already been affected, making it the worst natural disaster in the country’s recent history,” he writes.

Maleeha Lodhi, a former journalist who was also a top diplomat, reiterates that while politicians were more concerned about their political agendas, it is Pakistani civil society that stepped in to help. “The exemplary role of the public should be matched by a display of solidarity among political leaders and parties. But this continues to be in short supply”, she writes in this article that first appeared in Dawn.

Ali makes another observation that I think is relevant for us in the media in India.

“The media’s delayed response to the climate catastrophe is partly explained by the fact that the narrative around ‘natural disasters’ does not easily offer a neat categorization of heroes and villains. This turns them into a tragedy that can invoke global pity but is unable to generate political contestation. Yet, politics really is at the heart of the tragedy today unfolding in Pakistan. It is thus imperative to nominate the villains responsible for the needless suffering of millions of people.”

If you noticed, the political blame game has already begun in Bengaluru. It happens all the time when such disasters take place. Yet the real “villains”, which would include all political parties and those who benefit from political power, and the way both flout long-term plans for short-term gains, are rarely identified. That is the role that only an independent media can play, an increasingly endangered species in both India and Pakistan.

The smog that India and Pakistan share

It is a crisis that requires our politicians to become statesmen, to think of the future generations rather than the next elections, to rise above petty point scoring to sitting down and working out feasible solutions. 

Writing in the Indian Express on 14 November, Nirupama Subramaniam writes about the fog that India and Pakistan share as it spreads its deadly footprint across the border, and envelopes towns, cities and the countryside on both sides.  She concludes: "Had Saadat Hasan Manto been alive, there would have been a short story by now on how India and Pakistan had agreed to exchange smog as a confidence-building measure."

But this is no laughing matter.  Pakistan and India share not just history but also geography. We share mountains and rivers, we grow the same crops, and the air we breathe is also the same.

Today, as dirty polluted air chokes people living in Lahore and in Amritsar and Delhi, we should remember that there are no border check posts that this filth has to cross in either direction. 

It is a crisis that requires our politicians to become statesmen, to think of the future generations rather than the next elections, to rise above petty point scoring to sitting down and working out feasible solutions.  It also means India and Pakistan must talk about polluted air and water even if strategic issues have to be set aside for the moment.  At this rate, there will be no Indians and Pakistanis left to do the talking if we continue to allow our cities and the countryside to become gas chambers.

It is easy to forget, but there was a time when India and Pakistan did talk to each other on these matters.  In 1989, there was an India-Pakistan Conference on the Environment in Lahore which I was lucky to attend.  It was initiated by the Pakistan section of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), headed then by a remarkable woman called Aban Marker Kabraji, a Parsi with family in Mumbai and Karachi.  On the Indian side, one of the main movers was the late Anil Agarwal, who headed the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in New Delhi.

In their joint Preface to the report that emerged from the conference titled, "Beyond Shifting Sands: The Environment in India and Pakistan" (IUCN and CSE 1994), Kabraji and Agarwal wrote: "The 'environment' that we met to talk about...remains as ever, beseiged.  Under attack by those same forces of greed, ignorance and mismanagement as before. There is a crisis of governance in both our societies, and the ideals and values implied in the sustainable development paradigm appear urgently and relevantly as the only way forward. "

What they wrote then could not be more relevant today.

Both our societies face a crisis of governance when it comes to the environment.  Every crisis, such as the current smog, is dealt with in a piecemeal fashion, as if all one wants is one clear day without smog.  Yet it is the cumulative actions and mismanagement of resources spanning over decades that have led to the current crisis. 

Undoing the wrongs of past policies must necessarily mean acknowledging what and why things went wrong.  No one is willing to sit down and address that, or to heed those who are pointing out the long-term correctives that can still be put in place.  Instead every authority -- whether a state government, or a court -- is busy undercutting and criticising measures suggested by the other without any constructive alternative. 

The problem we face is not SMOG -- it is the fog in our minds, and our inability to rise above the clutter to see the clear light of day.

Giving credit where it is due

Posted on The Hoot

Manu Pubby, however, made no mention in his story that this letter had first appeared in a story by Sarwar in The News as part of Aman Ki Asha. Not just that, but his story ran with a misleading headline. it is curious how often the Indian media fails to acknowledge the original source for a story, says KALPANA SHARMA. Pix courtesy CNN IBN

Posted/Updated Sunday, Aug 14 11:32:05, 2011

SECOND TAKE KALPANA SHARMA Barkha Dutt must be complimented for her programme, “The Buck Stops Here” on August 10. Not so much for having got an ‘exclusive’ but for performing the journalistically correct gesture of acknowledging the person who actually got the exclusive. The story that Dutt featured in her one-hour news programme on August 10 was the amazing letter written by a Pakistan Air Force pilot to the descendants of occupants on an Indian civilian aircraft that he shot down during the 1965 Indo-Pak war. Qais Hussain managed through Indian friends to trace the daughter of Jahangir ‘Jhangoo’ Engineer, the pilot of an aircraft with eight passengers including the Chief Minister of Gujarat, Balwantrai Mehta that strayed near the Pakistan border at the height of the war. Hussain’s email was sent on August 5. But Farida Singh, Engineer’s daughter, became aware of this only after Manu Pubby of Indian Express ran a page one story on Hussain’s letter. Following this, Farida checked her mail, read the letter, and wrote a remarkable response to Hussain.  Dutt’s journalistic coup was in getting together on the same programme not just Hussain, who lives in Islamabad, but Farida Singh, who lives in Delhi, and the daughter-in-law and grand-daughter of Balwantrai Mehta, who live in Mumbai. Additionally, Dutt also invited Beena Sarwar, Pakistani journalist and filmmaker who is in-charge of the Aman Ki Asha campaign that her newspaper, The News, and The Times of India have run jointly for 20 months. It was Sarwar who first reported the Quais letter. Incidentally, as has been mentioned in this column earlier, The News appears to be taking the Aman Ki Asha far more seriously than The Times of India. The latter ran out of steam shortly after the campaign for peace between India and Pakistan was launched. The News, on the other hand, under the able and imaginative leadership of Beena Sarwar, is constantly coming out with interesting stories, the latest being the letter by Qais Hussain. Manu Pubby, however, made no mention in his story that this letter had first appeared in a story by Sarwar in The News as part of Aman Ki Asha. Not just that, but his story ran with a misleading headline: “After 46 yrs, the healing touch: Pak pilot says sorry for mistake.”   If you read the letter by Hussain, nowhere does he admit to making a mistake in shooting down a civilian aircraft. What he does say is that he hesitated because the aircraft gestured, pleading to be left alone, asked his command what he should do. “Instead of firing at him at first sight, I relayed to my controller that I had intercepted an eight seat transport aircraft  (guessing by the four side windows) and wanted further instructions to deal with it. At the same time, I was hoping that I would be called back without firing a shot. There was a lapse of 3 to 4 long minutes before I was given clear orders to shoot the aircraft.” (To read the entire letter, click here) He also clarifies that the reason he was reaching out to the families of those killed in the aircraft is because he wanted to set the record straight. “I did not play foul and went by the rules of business but the unfortunate loss of precious lives, no matter how it happens, hurts each human and I am no exception. I feel sorry for you, your family and the other seven families who lost their dearest ones.” There is no indication anywhere in the letter that Hussain thinks he made a mistake. In a letter that Hussain has sent to Indian Express, which at the time of writing (August 12) had not yet been printed, he expresses his strong objection to the headline and clarifies, yet again, that he had sympathized with Farida Singh and others who lost members of their families in that aircraft and had said that he felt sorry for them. “I had not said anywhere that I had made a mistake and that I wished to apologize for it”, he writes.   Hussain’s gesture and Farida Singh’s amazingly gracious response constitute a touching and unusual story in the history of the fraught relations between India and Pakistan. It is a pity that some in the Indian media have failed to build on the main strength of this gesture and instead chosen to give their own interpretation. In contrast, it is worth reading Beena Sarwar’s story in The News following Farida Singh’s response and the NDTV show. It is accurate, picks out the relevant parts of Singh’s letter, and brings out the most positive aspect of the exchange between Singh, Hussain and Mehta’s relatives on Dutt’s programme.   Coming back to the issue of acknowledging the source, it is curious how often Indian media fails on this count. Another recent example that comes to mind was the well-written and researched op-ed article by Priscilla Jebraj in The Hindu commenting on a sensational lead in Hindustan Times on June 26, “Docs turn scores of baby girls into boys” in Indore. The story had claimed that the doctors were performing genitoplasty on newborn babies. The Hindu story exposed the fallacious basis of that story by speaking to doctors. Jebraj also got the responses of the editors of Hindustan Times who chose to run the story. Unfortunately, she failed to acknowledge that the original story pointing this out had already appeared on this very website, The Hoot several weeks earlier. Does media competition have to mean that we do not give credit where it is due?   I suppose it is too much to expect Indian newspapers to adhere to the code of ethics a newspaper like The Guardian expects its journalists to follow. But here is what it says about attribution:   “Credits: Staff must not reproduce other people’s material without attribution, other than in exceptional circumstances – for example where the source cannot be identified – and only with permission of the most senior editor on duty. The source of published material obtained from another organisation should be acknowledged, including quotes taken from other newspaper articles. Bylines should be carried only on material that is substantially the work of the bylined journalist.”   (To read the original, click on the link above)