TV media sinks lower as independent media offers glimmer of hope in 2025

 Broken News

2025 in Review

Published in Newslaundry on December 22, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/12/22/tv-media-sinks-lower-as-independent-media-offers-glimmer-of-hope-in-2025

As we come to the end of 2025, how do we assess the state of our mainstream media? Can it sink lower than it already has, given that it stands at 151 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index? 

It can because in more than two instances this year, mainstream media, especially TV news, has demonstrated the depths to which it can fall.

Yet there is a glimmer of hope: despite the dismal performance of mainstream TV channels, independent journalists and digital platforms still survive and do the kind of journalism this country needs.

The two lowest points for our mainstream media this year, in my view, were the coverage of Operation Sindoor and the reporting and follow-up stories after the Delhi blast, when a car exploded at peak hour near the Red Fort, killing an estimated 15 people.

Indian TV channels love war and conflict. It allows them to dramatise, increase decibel levels, and stage the conflict in their studios by pitching individuals who can outshout their opponents. But the coverage of Operation Sindoor exceeded expectations. 

Indian channels, even so-called “respectable” news channels like India Today, fell for the fake news that India had captured Lahore and bombed Karachi. In the rush to be the first, these channels fell hook, line and sinker for the most obvious fake news. 

Even a slight pause, a pinch of scepticism, and taking time to implement a basic journalistic norm – verify and double check – would have saved them from this stupid and appalling faux pas. But no, who has the time these days to do this? Scepticism is reserved for statements made by those who oppose the government, while obedience to the narrative of those who support it is the norm.

Just watch this episode of TV Newsance by Manisha Pande to remind yourself of the disgraceful coverage by our leading TV news channels. It is cringeworthy.

In fact, Rajdeep Sardesai, one of the many anchors who allowed these fairy tales to be broadcast as if they were verified news, acknowledges that it was a mistake and says he apologised on air. A long profile piece on him in Caravan mentions that in a post-mortem bureau meeting, when asked why they didn’t verify the news, India Today staffers said that several reporters had been called by ministers and senior officials from various ministries telling them that this was precisely what was going to happen and that TV channels should “break” this news.

The media’s behaviour during Operation Sindoor reconfirms what’s now well known: that the government briefs journalists through messages and phone calls about what should be reported.

The other low point in my view is the way the media reported the Delhi blast and its aftermath. All kinds of unverified information were instantly broadcast and reported. Basically, anything the government or investigative agencies told the media was presented as the truth, with no effort at fact-checking (read here).

A consequence of such reporting was felt immediately by ordinary Kashmiris in other parts of the country and in Kashmir. The demolition of the house of the main suspect was reported but not questioned; the fact that all doctors from Kashmir were being viewed as potential suspects was also not questioned. 

And if this was not enough, the locked office of the Kashmir Times in Jammu was raided by the State Investigation Agency, which claimed it had found guns and ammunition in it. The editors and owners of the paper, which is now published remotely as a digital publication, have been charged under various sections, including for violating India’s “sovereignty”. Kashmir Times is practically the only independent voice coming out of Kashmir, as most others have either fallen in line or been banned. 

The state of the media in Kashmir, and the problems that journalists there face almost every day, continues to be the litmus test for the extent of freedom that the Indian media enjoys. Just this week, the police arrived at the home of Jehangir Ali, the reporter for The Wire, and without a warrant, seized his phone without providing him with the hash value to ensure that it would not be tampered with. He finally got the phone back after several hours.

A glimmer of hope

Despite the Modi government's proactive efforts to ensure that mainstream media sticks to the approved narrative, and the threats and intimidation, especially against journalists in Kashmir, aimed at sending a clear message to other journalists who choose to do their jobs, several remarkable investigative stories have appeared on independent platforms.

At a time when the word “environment” is clubbed with the killer air pollution levels in Delhi and in many other cities in India, it is important to remember that there are other pressing environmental challenges that get precious little coverage in the media, such as the handing over of forests to private interests. 

A story to note is independent journalist M. Rajshekhar's piece on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Writing in Time magazine, Rajshekhar reports on the disaster that the natural resources of the islands and the indigenous communities face due to the government’s policies.

Another story that stands out for the challenge the reporter must have faced while investigating it is Nidhi Suresh's report in The News Minute. The journalist did a remarkable job by talking to the nun who alleged she was raped by Bishop Franco Mulakkal in 2018. Although the Bishop was acquitted, no one knows what happened to the nun. Nidhi Suresh traced her and persuaded her to speak. The result is a chilling narrative in 10 parts of the life of this woman.

Another recent investigative story is Sukanya Shantha's three-part series in The Wire.  Based on publicly available data, Shantha has followed up on the National Investigation Agency’s claims that it secured convictions in 100 percent of its cases in 2024. Her digging revealed that this was happening because the people accused, the majority of them Muslim men charged under laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), were persuaded to plead guilty when faced with the reality that they would spend much longer in jail as undertrials waiting for the trial to begin.  

While Alt News remains outstanding in its fact-checking work, as seen best during Operation Sindoor, Newslaundry has also done notable stories, like this one on the stampede during the Kumbh Mela this year. The government insisted that only 30 people had died. NL reporters, however, found that as many as 79 had died in the stampede. This was established by doing the kind of routine work that journalists are expected to do: first being sceptical of government data, then following up and checking for yourself. When that is done, as we saw during the Covid pandemic, there’s always a yawning gap between official figures and reality.

While “vote chori” and elections continue to be widely covered, the back story of how political parties like the BJP are funded, particularly before the Supreme Court scrapped the Electoral bonds scheme, did not get the same kind of attention. 

Although Indian Express has now done a detailed story on who funds political parties, earlier it was independent platforms that investigated the Electoral Bonds scheme. More recently, the Reporters’ Collective has investigated the BJP's funding in Assam. The results are revealing. Most of the funders are people who have won lucrative government contracts.

And finally, like Kashmir, some of the best reporting on Northeast India, which only comes into focus during conflict, is from reporters working for independent digital news platforms. Like this report by Rokibuz Zaman of Scroll of the people physically pushed out of Assam into Bangladesh because they were suspected to be “foreigners” even though they were Indian citizens.

In sum, at the end of 2025, we are where we were at the end of 2024. The mainstream media houses, and specifically their television channels, continue to compete to go lower with news that is sometimes untrue and almost always divisive in a country where the nature of our politics increasingly fractures the polity.

And for real journalism, for in-depth stories, practically the only source – although some print media like Indian Express, The Hindu and Times of India have done some excellent long-form stories – are the independent digital news platforms that continue to survive, even if precariously.

From Trump’s ceasefire claim to Modi’s G-7 optics, media didn’t ask the right questions

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 19, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/06/19/from-trumps-ceasefire-claim-to-modis-g-7-optics-media-didnt-ask-the-right-questions

Did he, or didn’t he? That is a question that remains unanswered. US President Donald Trump continues to claim that he stopped the clash between India and Pakistan after India launched Operation Sindoor in May. At the same time, we are told officially that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a telephone conversation with Trump, told him in no uncertain terms that India will never accept mediation and that the “pause” between the two countries was agreed upon bilaterally.  

The Indian media’s reporting of this purported telephone conversation between Modi and Trump, soon after the latter left the G 7 summit in Canada, consisted of an almost verbatim reproduction of the external affairs ministry’s report on it. Furthermore, the claim that Trump had “stepped back” from his repeated claims that he was responsible for the end of hostilities between India and Pakistan was based on a statement Trump made after he met Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir. In it he didn’t emphasise his own role. But could this be credited to his conversation with Modi? Or was he merely being diplomatic?  

Meanwhile, reports continue to appear quoting Trump saying much the same as he had stated earlier, claiming he was responsible for the “ceasefire” between India and Pakistan. 

Another example of questions left unanswered in the coverage of foreign affairs is the recently concluded G-7 summit. It was routinely reported until Modi, who was invited rather late in the day, made it to Canada. By then, Trump had already left.  There were no official photo-op as in previous summits. So why did the Indian PM, the leader of the world’s most populous nation, feel he had to accept being a sideshow in this summit? How did India benefit? Such questions, even if they were asked, were not part of the reportage.

The Hindu was an exception as it raised some questions in its editorial. Calling it a “Failed summit”, it concluded that “To have the Prime Minister travel more that 11,000 kilometres to address one outreach session of a fractious summit may not be the most optimal use of India’s resources.” 

This is only one of the many examples of how even the print media, which still occasionally shows some spunk by asking questions, today looks and reads almost the same across publications when it comes to any foreign policy issue.

In any case, in the larger scheme of things, especially at a time when we are teetering on the verge of a major conflagration in West Asia if the US decides to enter the ongoing war between Israel and Iran, perhaps such minutiae about who said what to whom don’t really matter. Foreign affairs have rarely excited readers except when our immediate neighbours are involved. 

But because all this has been front page news, it is worth considering what the reporting tells us about the coverage of foreign affairs in the print media and the uniformity in the style and substance of it.

This virtual uniformity brings back memories of the Emergency, declared 50 years ago by Indira Gandhi, on June 25, 1975. Several newspapers are carrying articles about it, a useful education for an entire generation that knows practically nothing about it. And the BJP has decided to make political capital out of the occasion by announcing that it will hold marches and meetings on what will be called “Samvidhan Hatya Divas”. Ironical, given the many attacks on the Constitution we have witnessed in the last decade since this party came to power at the Centre and in several states.

The big difference in the last 50 years is the change in what constitutes the media.  In those days it was “press” or print media. Television and radio were government controlled.

Today, not only have print publications proliferated, but the media scene is crowded with hundreds of television channels, social media, digital news platforms and video streaming platforms. Although print has not lost its relevance as precipitously as it has in a country like the US, there is a noticeable decline as the younger generation rarely turn to a newspaper as the main source of news.

In many ways, this diversification is a good thing. It makes the job of an authoritarian regime even more difficult when it wants to control access to information. 

Indira Gandhi had a relatively easy time in 1975. Yet even then, there was an underground network through which news circulated. It was unorganised, risky and with a limited reach. Still, word did get around and once censorship was lifted in the run-up to the 1977 general elections, it was evident that people already knew about the arrests of opposition leaders, the forced sterilisation campaigns in north India, the ruthless slum demolitions in cities like Mumbai and Delhi and the “encounter” killings of people suspected of being Naxalites. None of these violations had been reported in the media.

I personally knew people who would painstakingly type out stories that had appeared in Western media on such human rights violations, make cyclostyled copies, and then post them in different parts of a city so that the source could not be traced. News also travelled through word of mouth at a time when there was nothing resembling social media. So even during such a time of oppression, when after an initial fight, the mainstream press fell in line, and most of the smaller, independent publications that tried to defy censorship were unable to survive, the government failed to clamp down completely on the circulation of news. 

Today, of course, we have a different media environment. Officially, there is no censorship. Yet, Big Media in India, including television and print, mostly toe the government line barring an occasional report or investigative story that suggests that the official narrative on any issue, foreign affairs or developmental programmes is not entirely true.

Also, despite its efforts, the Modi government has not succeeded in controlling the counter narrative on independent digital channels. Ask any ordinary person you meet – a taxi driver, a migrant worker, a domestic help. Ask them where they get their news from. Rarely will you find someone who says they read newspapers. The majority of those even interested in news, and this interest is not universal, say they access it through channels on YouTube. And some of the most popular are those that are openly critical of this government such as Ravish Kumar, Abhisar Sharma, Punya Prasun Bajpai and Deepak Sharma. 

If there is any lesson to be learned on this 50th anniversary of the Emergency, it is this. 

While controlling a diverse media is more difficult, every government with an authoritarian streak will work out ways to control it. And perhaps the sameness of coverage that we already witness on some issues in mainstream media suggests that aspects of that control are already working. 

There is no guarantee that more avenues for control of media will not be devised.  So, diversity of media cannot permanently stall a determined government’s efforts to stifle the free flow of information. In fact, the experience of the Emergency has taught us that there is no room for complacency if you believe that a free media is essential for the survival of a democracy. 

Full volume on Op Sindoor, silence on the stateless

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 5, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/06/05/full-volume-on-op-sindoor-silence-on-the-stateless

While the Indian mainstream media remained obsessed about Operation Sindoor and reported uncritically even as the Prime Minister and members of his party made political capital from the recent Indo-Pak armed clash, a quiet, more insidious episode unfolded, largely unnoticed. 

The first to draw attention to it wasMaktoob Media, a digital news platform based in Kerala. Two days after the guns fell silent on the borders of India and Pakistan, it claimed on May 12 that around 40 Rohingya, who were registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees India and recognised as stateless, were literally pushed off a naval boat into the sea near the coast of Myanmar. The Rohingya, as is well-known, fled Myanmar in 2017 to escape persecution by its military junta.

The report alleged that, on May 8, even as the Solicitor General was assuring the Supreme Court that deportations would follow established procedures and the law, these men and women were first summoned to a police station, then flown to Port Blair in the Andamans and then blind-folded, shackled and put on a naval boat before being pushed into the sea. The group included elderly men, women and children, who had to allegedly swim ashore to safety. 

This was followed up by a story in Scroll that contained more details.

Mainstream media only woke up when Tom Andrews, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said: “The idea that Rohingya refugees have been cast into the sea from naval vessels is nothing short of outrageous. I am seeking further information and testimony regarding these developments and implore the Indian government to provide a full accounting of what happened.” 

The UN statement drew the attention of the international media with reports appearing in New York Times, South China Morning Post and Straits Times.

Since early May, there has been little by way of follow-up to this story or even comment on this except, predictably, in independent digital platforms. The most searing comment was this article by Harsh Mander in Scroll. He asks how India has become “a place in which exceptional cruelty, prejudice and a casual defiance of constitutional obligations and customary international law have become official state policy”.

Meanwhile, equally insidious and inhuman is the process that continues in Assam of “pushing back” suspected Bangladeshi nationals. 

Once again, as in the case of the Rohingya, the early reports appeared in independent digital platforms. The stories were heart-breaking. Many of those literally pushed back across the India-Bangladesh border were married women, who had not been able to prove their citizenship.

Read the stories by Rokibuz Zaman in Scroll: Of a teacher picked up and pushed out, of two women, Shona Bhanu and Begum, who were amongst the people pushed out only to be brought back because they are Indian citizens. 

These stories remind us again what was known ever since the Assam government undertook the process of the National Register of Citizens and set up quasi-judicial Foreigners’ Tribunals in 2019. Over time, lakhs of people have been declared “foreigners” by these tribunals leaving them no option but to spend time and money hiring lawyers and filing cases in higher courts. 

Also, as was evident almost from the start, the process has disproportionately affected the poor and unlettered, many of them married women. Read this article by Abhishek Saha, who followed the story of one woman, Manowara Bewa. Declared “illegal” by a tribunal in 2016, detained, sent to a detention centre and finally released on bail in 2019, she was picked by the police on May 24, and “pushed back” into Bangladesh despite her pending appeal in the Supreme Court.

In 2019, at the height of the NRC process, and soon after the tribunals were set up, the media did report on what was going on. Even then, it was evident that the process was unlikely to be fair to those who do not have sufficient documents, a reality facing millions of poor people in this country.

I saw this when I visited Assam in 2019. The sight of thousands of men and women, clutching plastic bags full of documents that they wanted to show lawyers who had offered to help is one that I cannot forget. Amongst them were many women who were completely bewildered and did not understand what was happening.

Even then, those who were following the issue could see the arbitrary way in which cases were decided in the tribunals. People travelled long distances to have their cases heard only to find that the date of the hearing had changed. Those who could not make it for a hearing often found that the tribunal had made a ruling ex parte. No outsiders, including journalists were permitted to sit through proceedings as they can in a regular court. This opacity made the process even more problematic. 

Today, more than five years after the renewed thrust to detect and deport suspected Bangladeshis took off in Assam, using Operation Sindoor as an excuse to prevent “infiltration”, the Assam government has stepped up its efforts by pushing out people “declared foreigner” by the tribunals despite their pending cases in other courts. As the article by Saha reminds us, “declared foreigners” are not “individuals who have been apprehended at India’s borders, attempting to enter the country without documentation on the sly. They are typically long-term residents with families and properties in Assam, who assert that they are Indian citizens.”

And he rightfully states: “The humanitarian crisis in Assam’s citizenship imbroglio begins here – neither India nor Bangladesh acknowledges the ‘declared foreigners’ as their own.”

While this story has failed to catch the interest of much of mainstream media, the one story that found prominent coverage was, not surprisingly, the official version of what happened last month. In response to reports about people being pushed back into Bangladesh, these reports quoted the Border Security Force saying they had successfully foiled “infiltration” from Bangladesh. Or this one that reports that 2000 “illegal immigrants” have been pushed back since Operation Sindoor and that officials claim some left voluntarily.

The story will not end today or tomorrow.  It is incumbent on the media to follow and report it, even if the place where the actual drama is taking place is the northeastern corner of India. 

For what this process shows us is how it becomes convenient for governments to pick on the weakest to show how decisive and strong they are. But physically throwing people off a boat or pushing a woman with an eight-month-old child across a physical border, leaving her and others standing through the night in a rice field, and for her family to not be told where she has disappeared, does not indicate a strong government. It only confirms one that it is indifferent to the plight of the most vulnerable.

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.