From one WhatsApp to every frontpage: How ‘sources’ dictated the Delhi blast coverage

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 13, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/11/13/from-one-whatsapp-to-every-frontpage-how-sources-dictated-the-delhi-blast-coverage

Every time a suspected terror attack takes place in India, you can be certain about how it will play out in the Indian media.  

Without waiting for verifiable information, there will be confident conspiracy scenarios spelt out, it will be pronounced as “terror” even before there is official confirmation, the neighbouring country will be blamed, and those whose names are put out as possible suspects will be broadcast as the perpetrators of the crime even before there is adequate and plausible evidence to charge them. With its desperate need to beat the competition over a 24-hour news cycle, the spin given based on few, or even no facts, by TV channels will send many heads spinning.

Additionally, in today’s divisive political atmosphere, if the suspects happen to be Muslim, then inevitably the hate and invective against an entire community will be aired without any compunction. 

That is precisely what we have witnessed, yet again, after the explosion that killed 13 people and injured many more on the evening of November 10 near the Red Fort metro station in Delhi.  

We know now that it was an explosion in a car. We are told there is certainty about the identity of the person driving the car. And after two days of speculation, hints by “sources” and conspiracy theories set out with great certainty by the usual suspects on mainstream television channels, the Modi government finally issued a statement saying that it was a “heinous terror incident” by “anti-national forces.” The anticipated accusation that Pakistan was behind it, something that has occurred so routinely as to be taken for granted, was not in the statement.

What one should note, however, is that in the preceding two days before this statement, neither the Union Home Ministry, nor the Delhi Police that was on the spot, has held an official briefing for the media.

The reason this stands out as unusual is because in the past, when such incidents took place, the media has been briefed officially, and not through unofficial sources.  

In Mumbai for instance, when serial blasts took place on Mumbai’s suburban trains on July 11, 2006, at peak rush hour, in which 209 people were killed and more than 700 injured, reporters were sent out to the blast sites to speak to survivors and gauge the situation on the ground. But at the same time, the police held official briefings giving out what information it had on hand. There was little room, or for that matter time, for speculation. Mainstream media at that time largely stuck to basic journalistic norms, “err on the side of caution and verify.” In today’s media sphere, that sounds like something in a foreign language. 

In the days following the Mumbai serial blasts, people were questioned, detained and some arrested. Those charged with what was seen as a “terror attack,” faced a trial, were convicted, sent to jail, and some even given the death sentence.

Yet, in July this year, 12 of these men who had been charged and convicted for the 2006 train blasts in Mumbai were acquitted by the Bombay High Court. The court held that the prosecution had “utterly failed” in establishing that these men had committed the crime for which they were charged.  

Indeed, one of the men acquitted earlier this year, Ehtesham Siddiqui, spent 19 years in jail, some of them on death row, before finally being acquitted. Although the Supreme Court has stayed the Bombay High Court ruling, those acquitted, including Siddiqui have not been sent back to jail. While in jail, Siddiqui wrote a book on his experience titled, “Horror saga”. His story is important at a time when once again, people are being interrogated, and some will be charged for a “terror attack”. 

Also worth reading is this article by Aditya Menon in The Quint about previous such incidents in Delhi.

To come back to the Delhi blast, a story that will continue to unravel in the days ahead, it is interesting to view the similarity of the reporting in the national daily newspapers following the incident. None of them could quote a single person from the government who was prepared to go on record. All the reporting was attributed to “sources” which, those who cover the central government will tell you, are based on informal messages sent out to journalists like this one: 

Sharing informally, kindly attribute it to sources: 

•⁠  Raids by security agencies across multiple locations in Delhi-NCR and Pulwama, recovering significant quantities of explosives, are believed to have led the suspect to act hastily under mounting pressure. 

•⁠  ⁠Earlier, during raids carried out on November 9 and 10, 2025, in Faridabad, Haryana, almost 3,000 kg of explosives, along with detonators, timers and other bomb making material were caught and confiscated.  

•⁠  ⁠The explosion was caused by panic and desperation due to raids carried out by the security agencies to nab them.

•⁠  ⁠The bomb was premature and not fully developed, thus limiting the impact.

•⁠  ⁠The explosion did not create a crater, and no shrapnel or projectiles were found.

•⁠  ⁠A major attack has been averted, credited to ‘pan-India alertness and coordinated crackdown’ on suspect modules.

Not surprisingly, the next day’s newspapers reported precisely what was contained in the message quoted above. Incidentally, the name of the suspect driving the car with the explosives, Dr Umar Nabi, was all over the media even before the DNA test had established his identity. As were the names of the other doctors who are suspects in what is being called a “white-collar terror module.” 

Perhaps, given the nature of the media today, with people looking to social media platforms first for “breaking news” followed by mainstream TV channels and only after that to the print media, there is little point in hoping that any of this feeding frenzy, especially after a “terror attack,” will ever change.  

Nor can we expect that this plethora of avenues for information and disinformation that exist today will disappear any day soon.

Reflecting in many ways the wishful thinking of those of us who still believe that credible journalism is possible and needed, Varghese K George, the resident editor of The Hindu in Delhi put out this comment on X after the Delhi blast:

“News cannot be, and should not be, a 24×7 affair. Can we turn back the clock and have news bulletins at periodic intervals? If not three times a day, perhaps four?

"The link between clean public information and democracy is a well-established fact. The positive correlation between misinformation and democratic decline is also an evident fact. Social media is often rightly blamed for this, but legacy media too is complicit in this decadence. At the core of the media’s collapse is the pressure for a constant, unending requirement for ‘updates.’

"The reality is that there is not, and there cannot be, and there should not be, minute-to-minute updates on any news – whether it is a Delhi blast or a Supreme Court hearing. 

"News should happen first, then be processed by experts, and only then transmitted to the public. That is what mediation of information should be about."

“Mediation of information.” Yes, in an ideal world, that is the job of the media.  But is that possible today? Can we really turn back the clock? Or has that train left the station, never to return?

Washington Post’s Adani-LIC story fizzled out in India. That says a lot

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 30, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/10/30/washington-posts-adani-lic-story-fizzled-out-in-india-that-says-a-lot

Whether the story had substance or not, it is intriguing that there has been little to no follow up in mainstream print media to the Washington Post expose about the Life Insurance Corporation’s investments in Gautam Adani’s companies, allegedly at the behest of the Modi government.

Or perhaps, given the current state of much of our mainstream media, we should not be surprised that a story like this, in a major international outlet, landed in India and created only a small ripple before it disappeared. The ripple was the result of the Congress demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee to investigate the allegations.

The tepid response in the Indian media cannot be dismissed merely by observing that given the media’s fixation with elections, currently the forthcoming elections in Bihar, there is neither time nor space to follow-up on the story. There is clearly more to this.

The Washington Post has alleged in its exclusive published on October 25 that a plan to invest $3.9 billion by the Life Insurance Corporation in Gautam Adani’s companies was overseen by officials of the Department of Financial Services.

The story states: “The documents and interviews show it was just one piece of a larger plan by Indian authorities to direct taxpayer money to a conglomerate owned by one of the country’s most prominent and politically well-connected billionaires. It is a vivid illustration of Adani’s clout within the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his longtime ally, and of how officials in New Delhi have come to see his business empire as central to the country’s economic fortunes.”

Newspapers did respond to this story, but with headlines that mentioned the denial by the LIC and little about the substance of the revelations in the article.

Here are some of the headlines the day after the story broke:

“LIC refutes Washington Post report on $3.9 bn Adani investment” in the Economic Times.

“Made investments in Adani firms independently, after detailed due diligence: LIC” in The Hindu.

“‘No letter written to LIC,’ Govt official rejects Post report questioning $3.9 bn investment in Adani Group,” wrote Financial Express.

“‘False and baseless’: LIC denies Washington Post report, says investment decisions taken after due diligence,” stated Mint.

Most of the other headlines were similar. 

For readers, who would not have accessed the original article, all they read was that the LIC had called the allegations made by the paper “false, baseless, and far from the truth.” This rebuttal also appeared as an unsigned statement on the LIC letterhead on X.

The Indian Express carried a report with more details about the original story and quoted unnamed officials “familiar with the matter” dismissing the allegations. While the Washington Post had claimed that the investment plan had been “crafted by officials at DFS (Department of Financial Services) in coordination with LIC and India’s main government-funded think tank, Niti Aayog,” and “approved by the Finance Ministry”, the officials who spoke to The Indian Express said that their department does not write letters to the LIC like the one quoted in the Post article.

To quote from The Indian Express story: “A government official told The Indian Express that DFS has not written any letter to LIC asking it to invest in the Adani Group. ‘The documents being mentioned in the media are not from DFS. It’s not true that DFS wrote to LIC to invest in Adani companies… DFS doesn’t write such letters to LIC,’ the official said.”

In other words, readers are being told that what the Washington Post has reported is baseless but no one from the government will go on the record to say so, leaving it to newspapers to quote unnamed officials as The Indian Express has done. How then as a citizen, or a reader, do you decide that this is, or is not, a major transgression by the Modi government to boost one particular business house?

Sohit Misra, who used to work with NDTV before it was taken over by Gautam Adani, but now runs his own YouTube channel, raises important questions about the coverage, or rather non-coverage by India’s mainstream media of this expose in this report. 

Misra takes us back to the pre-Modi era, when the media relentlessly asked the government led by Manmohan Singh tough questions about several scams that were exposed, like the 2G scam for instance. Even though finally these cases were dismissed as there wasn’t enough evidence, at that time the media was out in full force questioning the government and alleging large-scale corruption. 

As Misra points out, the contrast today is striking. Even if the story in the Post is speculative or even wrong, given that it involves the government and India’s richest man, is it not an issue that ought to be followed up independently by our media? Is it enough just to run denials and quotes from anonymous officials? 

Of course, the journalists who have relentlessly followed the Adani story, how his wealth has grown dramatically in the last decade, have been subject to innumerable court cases and harassment. Journalists like Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who holds that the Washington Post report is factual and substantive. 

This, in fact, is a story worth recounting because it illustrates how the job of investigating anything sensitive, that could land a media house in trouble, is now left entirely to under-resourced independent media platforms. 

Even as I write this column, another investigative platform, Cobra Post has come out with a story on the other big business house in India that is often in the news, the Ambanis. Given the response to the Adani story, if at all mainstream media takes note of this expose, the headlines in major newspapers will not surprise anyone.