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. 

 

No gas and no vote: Inside the two-front war on the poor that mainstream media misses

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on April 9, 2026

The US and Israel-led war against Iran might, or might not, end as the world holds its collective breath following the declaration of a ceasefire for two weeks. But in India, there are at least two wars that are affecting millions of ordinary people. As in West Asia, the people most affected did not ask for these wars.

To get a sense of what is going on in India, you must search hard to find the stories that record the distress of millions of people on two fronts: one, the lack of cooking gas, and two, being denied the right to vote.

Take the cooking gas crisis. Headlines are dominated by regular statements from the government saying there is no shortage and that people must not panic and believe rumours.

On the ground, however, the story is very different, as reports in some newspapers and on independent platforms like Newslaundry illustrate. The crisis hasn’t affected those with stable housing, the extra cash to keep a backup cylinder, or the official paperwork required to register with local gas dealers.

Those hit hardest are migrant workers, as this story by Sachin Chhabra on X illustrates. It tells us of the precarity of their lives, where literally one thing can push them to the city, or force them to return to their villages. 

 

These are the people who bore the brunt of the Modi government’s sudden declaration of a national lockdown on March 25, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with only a few hours' notice. The prime minister’s statement, following the impact on the flow of petroleum-based products after February 28 and the attack on Iran, mentioned the pandemic. That was enough to fuel rumours of another lockdown.

Even though films and articles have been written about the impact of that lockdown on migrant workers, and the toll it took on their lives and their livelihoods, it was easily forgotten once the pandemic ended.

Yet, both video and print reports, such as this in The Indian Express and this by Saurabh Shukla, repeatedly point out that the lives of migrant workers remain precarious. They cannot withstand a disruption to something as essential as cooking fuel in their makeshift shelters. Despite the government's boasts of economic progress, these reports make it evident that these realities have not changed.

Take, for instance, reports like this one on the impact of the LPG crisis on industries in a city like Surat, a hub of all types of industry. Most of these are small and medium-scale. The workers they employ are on a contract basis. What they earn is sufficient if there is no disruption, like a pandemic or a shortage of cooking gas. Once this happens, their ability to survive in the city is drastically reduced, leaving them with no option but to return quietly to their villages.

Of course, in these industries, there are other ways in which the shortage of petroleum-based products or rising prices has affected their bottom line.

What is notable about these developments, or this virtual war on the poor, is that they are not dramatic, like the exodus following the lockdown. It is noted only when railway stations are crowded, or when there is news of industries closing. But it is a slow, deadly war on the ability of the most vulnerable in our cities to survive.

The reading and viewing public of our mainstream media newspapers and channels may not even understand why these workers are leaving. They do not know, or bother to find out, where these people live, even as they construct buildings and infrastructure, work in small factories, or work as errand boys. They do not know that, without a permanent address in the city, these people cannot get LPG connections; that, even before this crisis hit, they had been buying small-sized cylinders on the black market. The sudden shortage of these cylinders and the steep price escalation when they are available determine whether they can continue living in the city.

The other “war” being waged is on the right of people to vote.

With the first phase of Assembly elections concluding on April 9, the focus will now turn to West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. In the former, the most important issue is the disenfranchisement of lakhs of voters under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise conducted by the Election Commission just before the elections.

Once again, as with the exodus of migrant workers from our cities, the stories capture the magnitude of this “war”, such as this report in The Telegraph. The video reports illustrate how the SIR process is puzzling, angering and causing widespread despair in people, mostly Muslim and poor, who have been voters for decades and suddenly find themselves disenfranchised. 

Furthermore, the redressal system is stacked against them getting any justice before their state goes to the polls, compounded by the Supreme Court's holding that they can wait till the next election, as this article by Yogendra Yadav in The Indian Express points out.

Here again, perhaps the magnitude of this “war” is not being fully appreciated by the rest of the country because it is focused on West Bengal. But if you read and listen to the stories, it is evident that this is a “war” that will be played out in many more states in the days to come.

Here, one must commend independent journalists and platforms that have captured the extent of the distress facing people denied the vote. Their reports, such as this one by Arfa Khanum Sherwani, highlight the gross unfairness built into the process of revising electoral rolls, which fails to give those disenfranchised enough time to appeal. And that too, by putting a system in place that seems stacked against the poor, and especially women.

These two virtually silent “wars” being waged in India illustrate the reality of this country that remains hidden if you watch only mainstream news channels. The voices of the marginalised cannot cut through the noise and din of political battles and the war of words that dominate so much of the news, in election season and even otherwise.

 

Fog of war or media smokescreen? When truth became a casualty in the Iran vs US-Israel conflict

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 27, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/03/27/fog-of-war-or-media-smokescreen-when-truth-became-a-casualty-in-the-iran-vs-us-israel-conflict

 

The unprovoked attack by Israel and the US on Iran that began on February 28 shows no signs of abating at the time of writing. Instead, it has sucked the entire world into a time of uncertainty.

In this “fog of war”, the biggest crisis, as always, is reliable information. In India, we have experienced this several times, most recently when the government launched attacks on our neighbour Pakistan in May last year with Operation Sindoor. There are no independent sources of information. So, the media basically becomes a megaphone for whatever the government wants to convey. 

 

Any questioning is considered “anti-national”, and this democratic country has laws to deal with such people. Hence, even if there is no direct censorship, the media, especially television news, resorts to self-censorship at best or becomes part of the band of cheerleaders at worst, not just amplifying what the government wants conveyed but also dramatising and exaggerating it. 

In the current conflict in West Asia, the media is facing a greater challenge, especially Western media, as I wrote in my last column. It has a few reporters on the ground in Iran. It relies on other “sources” and casts doubt in different ways on any official pronouncement coming out of Iran.

In contrast, we are led to believe that reports on the destruction in Israel caused by Iranian missiles and drones are factual.

This article in Columbia Journalism Review gives us a different picture. It is particularly interesting because it reflects much of what is happening in the media in India, even when the country is not at war.

According to this article, Israeli military censors control all information coming out of that country. There is pre-censorship of reports about operations conducted by the Israeli military. And the media is expected to report only what is officially conveyed by the Israeli military command.

Here is one example of censorship that might seem obvious until you think about it: 

“The censor doesn’t acknowledge what it has censored but, at times, an observer can make educated guesses about the censor’s work. Take, for example, this piece published by Walla, an Israeli outlet, in August of 2025, during an earlier round of conflict with Iran. The article states that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office at the Kirya, a military headquarters in Tel Aviv, is unusable and requires renovations. The article mysteriously does not state what caused its sudden deterioration.”

The author also cites a 2024 analysis of Israeli media and reports that of around 20,000 articles submitted to Israeli censors, 1,600 were banned and 6,000 were partially censored.

Much like India, there is widespread self-censorship in the country’s media.  According to Gideon Levy, a columnist with the newspaper Haaretz and a critic of Israeli PM Netanyahu, most journalists are obeying the rules. 

To quote from the CJR article:

“Levy told me that military censorship has never been as effective in pushing the government line as the Israeli press’s self-censorship. ‘They are really serving like the PR people of the army,’ Levy said of Israeli journalists. These days, the fact that any piece of reporting was approved by the censor is presented ‘as if it’s a source of pride,’ he observed. ‘Which is pathetic.’ This form of self-censorship reached a peak, Levy said, during the war in Gaza. ‘You couldn’t see anything from Gaza in the Israeli media. Not the children, not the suffering. Nothing. They just didn’t cover Gaza.’ But ‘nobody asked the media not to show it’.”

That last sentence is the most troubling. When the media chooses not to show even that which it has not been specifically asked to show, and surely, in India, we can think of many parallels, as I have repeatedly highlighted in this space.

We are burdened today with an overload of information, not least because US President Donald Trump has mastered the art of always being in the news.  If he is not speaking to the media directly, he is posting on his social media platform, Truth Social.

The latest announcement of a five-day ‘pause’ in the war (although there was no ‘pause’ either of Israel striking places in Iran and continuing its efforts to eliminate Iran’s leadership, or of the Iranians hitting back) is a case in point. The media here and around the world have focused almost entirely on his post: Are the Iranians negotiating with the US, even though they say they are not? Or are the Americans bluffing? 

The average reader is left perplexed and essentially uninformed. Who do you believe? A president who uses social media to make important official announcements? Or the Iranians, whose announcements come from official platforms and who insist they are not negotiating with the US? And given the reality of censorship in Israel and Iran, how do you assess the extent of the damage in both countries during this war?  

A surprising admission during this time of misinformation overload came from Shashank Joshi, the defence editor of The Economist, a conservative magazine not known for sensationalism.

In a post on X, Joshi admitted that the story that Hamas had beheaded children during the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, was not verified. 

He wrote: “Some of these reports have turned out to be untrue, and yes, I was wrong to be as confident in what was reported as first-hand evidence as I was, particularly given the fog of war in those initial post Oct 7th days.” 

And yet not only did The Economist carry the story, but many other Western media outlets did as well. It’s a story that refuses to die, with most recently Trump, in the context of the war on Iran, repeating that they (meaning the Iranians) beheaded babies. 

Stories like the one about Hamas beheading babies linger because the media that reported such a story do not bother to ensure that the verified version, which puts a lie to this claim, gets as much prominence. If the Western media, which makes such a big deal about publishing only “verified” news, had done due diligence in the immediate aftermath of October 7, surely such a false and terrible story would not have continued doing the rounds.

Unfortunately, the belated mea culpa by The Economist does not alter the damage that has already been done, as this false story has fed into the Islamophobia that continues to prevail around the world.  

For Western and Indian press, people are just footnotes in the performance of war

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 12, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/03/12/for-western-and-indian-press-people-are-just-footnotes-in-the-performance-of-war

 

As I write this on March 12, we have entered the 13th day of the unprovoked war launched by Israel and the United States against Iran. Every day we are inundated with information, opinion, and visuals on this constantly developing war with no end in sight.

Yet, through all this information overload, what is missing is the story of the people who pay the price, the so-called “collateral damage”.

On the very first day of the coordinated strikes by Israel and the US on Iran, we heard news of the targeted strike in Tehran that killed not just Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and members of his family but several top military leaders as well.

Only later were there reports of the devastating strike on a primary school in the southern city of Minab in which an estimated 175 were killed, most of them girls between the ages of 7 and 11.  

This story ought to have been on the front pages of newspapers around the world alongside the killing of Iran’s top leadership. But it was relegated either to the bottom of the front page or an inside page.  

The treatment of what is clearly considered a war crime exemplifies, in many ways, the attitude of Western media about wars that are in lands away from their own frontiers.

Some days after this killing of children, the New York Times did its own forensic investigation and suggested that the school had been struck by a US missile, one of several that had targeted the base of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard close by. Other media organisations like CNN and Al Jazeera also conducted similar investigations and at the end of it, the consensus was that not only was it a US missile but specifically the long-range Tomahawk that struck the school. Yet the New York Times report does not emphasise that the majority of those killed were children.

Also, predictably, none of this information in the American mainstream media made a difference to the narrative of the US government, which either denied it (President Trump even suggested that it was Iran that targeted the school), or avoided an answer saying it was being investigated. The pictures and videos in these reports were quite damning.

For people following the war closely, it was only social media and some reports in the British press and independent digital news platforms like Drop Site that gave the full picture of that atrocity.

Verification or excuse?

Western mainstream media claims that they will not publish anything that they cannot independently verify. Yet routinely, the statements made by the Israeli defence ministry about casualties caused by attacks by Iran, for instance, and earlier during the still on-going military campaign by Israel on Gaza, the same media apparently did not feel this need to “independently” verify.

In fact, a look back at the coverage of the attack on Gaza by Israel since October 2023 shows repeatedly that much of the Western media routinely repeated what Israeli authorities put out. But information coming out of Gaza, such as the death toll including the number of children and women killed, was always qualified by phrases like “according to the Hamas-controlled health authorities”. For readers, perhaps this is not important. But what this clearly signifies is a doubt about the figures whereas the numbers put out by the other side are taken as credible.

Coming back to Minab, if a newspaper like The Guardian in the UK could access videos and photographs to bring home to people the gruesome outcome of this attack, it is inconceivable that other mainstream outlets in the US could not do the same.

The only conclusion one can come to is that the decision not to investigate the human tragedy in Minab was not because of the internet ban in Iran, but because the performance of war was considered more important than the human tragedy.

Think for a moment if on March 1, the front pages of the main newspapers and television channels in the US had carried the pictures of the destruction of the school, that included the colourful backpacks and little limbs of the dismembered girls strewn across the site, what would have been the reaction of the American public?

Or take the photograph that appeared a few days later, of graves being dug to bury these children, used on the front page of the Indian Express in India but not used prominently in major media outlets in the West. What would have been the reaction?

I ask because in the 1970s, at the height of the Vietnam war, it is generally acknowledged that one of the photographs that fuelled the anti-war sentiment in the US was that of a nine-year-old girl running away from her village on which the US-backed South Vietnamese forces had dropped a napalm bomb. Her clothes had been burned off, as was the skin on her back.  

That photograph, now remembered as the “Napalm girl”, repulsed people around the world. Incidentally, a recent documentary The Stringer has raised questions about the credit given for that photograph. It was generally accepted that it was Nick Ut of the Associated Press who took the photograph. Yet according to this investigative documentary, the credit should go to a local stringer.

Indian media’s problem

Often it is one photograph, or a detailed report on the human cost of war, that turns the tide during a war bringing home the reality that the real cost of war is always borne by ordinary people who had nothing to do with starting it.

Yet, it is almost a norm, including here in India, to cover war and conflict almost as if they are video war games or a “performance” as Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in his column in Indian Express. There are reports about the armaments used like missiles, about successful “precision strikes” on specific targets and the damage. For example, the story of how Israel determined when to attack on Iran was reported in Financial Times and The Guardian, which detailed how Israel’s Mossad and the CIA became certain that top Iranian leaders would gather on Saturday. And now, much of the reporting is about oil supplies, the stock markets, the impact on the economies of various countries etc.

What remains mostly missing is the story of people. Take the instance of the Israeli strikes on the oil storage facilities in Tehran. The result was not just the huge fires that were visible all over the city but the black poisonous smoke that enveloped it, and the acid rain that fell on a city with an estimated population of 10 million. The long-term impact of this one strike on the air, water and soil in and around Tehran and how it will manifest in the health of people, especially the vulnerable, is yet to emerge.

Yet, this too was a story with barely any follow-up. In Western media, the visuals were provided by one reporter from CNN who got permission to report from Iran.  Otherwise, you had to depend again on independent sources or social media to tell you the full story such as this report in Drop Site. 

Only when this war ends will we be able to assess the real impact of Western media’s sanitised reporting on this war on the public in the US and elsewhere. But some general observations can be made even now.

One, that such reporting reminds us that a media that is corporatised, that caters to those who fund it, will decide what is newsworthy based on what they want. This has become a reality not just in the West but also in India.

Secondly, the emphasis on verifying independently has become a useful excuse to play down stories from places where the Western press does not have feet on the ground. Surely, enterprising journalists from Western media can find ways to get stories with the human angle. If such stories do not appear, there must be a reason beyond logistics and so-called verification.

Third, in every country, even those that claim their press is free, the political and social norms that dominate also determine to some extent how journalists report. Perhaps we cannot generalise about a “Western” filter of coverage of this war, but if today you contrast what appears on Western news channels with a network like Al Jazeera, that is based in the region, you can see the difference. 

What is worth noting also is that the Indian media is almost totally dependent today on reports from the Western media. Look at any newspaper over the last 13 days. All the reports on the war are attributed to Western news agencies or newspapers like the New York Times. In fact, it is surprising that Indian media does not use more stories from Al Jazeera that has correspondents in Iran.  

Let me end with this telling quote from the Columbia Journalism Review:

“In January, after the US invaded Venezuela, CJR wrote that a press focus on military maneuvers ‘seemed to come, disappointingly, at the expense of attention to the humanitarian cost of the attack.’ Reporters covering this new war will find, as they have in recent months, that ‘it’s difficult to get voices out of Iran,’ Mohamad Bazzi, the director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and an associate professor of journalism at New York University, told CJR the other day. NetBlocks, a global internet monitor, reported an ‘internet blackout’ in Iran on Sunday, with national connectivity at 1 percent. But journalists must navigate a moral blackout, too. In the days and weeks to come, as the Iranian people endure more hardship, it’s crucial that the press bear witness to their suffering. As de Pear put it, ‘The reporting of wars seems to have been inverted; what the powerful say and do is being reported first, and the killing of innocents is mentioned in passing, if at all.’”