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.

Apart from Russia-Ukraine and assembly polls, here are other news stories we must not forget

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 3, 2022

Just as we were getting over the war against a virus, the world, or at least Europe, has been plunged into another war. And the repercussions are being felt everywhere.

But amidst the fog of war following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that understandably dominates the news everywhere, including in India, and even as the cacophony of the assembly elections in five states subsides, there are some other stories that must be noted, reported and not permitted to be overwhelmed by the immediate.

In January, I had written about what the sudden closure of the Kashmir Press Club meant to the already beleaguered journalists working out of Kashmir. At that point, only Sajad Gul, who was a trainee journalist with Kashmir Walla, had been arrested. The digital platform's editor, Fahad Shah, was still free. Today, both these journalists are in jail.

Both of them were first called in for what appeared to be routine questioning. When they went to the police station, they were arrested in one case. As soon as they got bail, they were immediately rearrested in another case.

The pattern was identical, the charges frivolous. But the laws under which they have been detained – the Public Safety Act in the case of Gul and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in Shah's case – are anything but frivolous. They ensure that the chances of their being released on bail are practically non-existent.

Since Shah's arrest on February 4, it has become evident that there is a clear method to this madness in Kashmir, as this story in Newslaundry outlines. It is to intimidate, threaten and control any and all journalists who want to do their jobs – which is to report as accurately and truthfully as they can about what is going on in their state. Their passport to safety is compliance. Stick to the government narrative and terminology and you will remain untouched. Stray from it and you risk not just the routine interrogation and surveillance but the virtual certainty of a jail term.

All this is happening despite the ruling by the Jammu and Kashmir High Court in 2021, quashing the FIR against another journalist Asif Naik, which stated: “No fetters can be placed on the freedom of press by registering the FIR against a reporter who was performing his professional duty by publishing a news item on the basis of information obtained by him from an identifiable source.”

Gul and Shah were doing textbook journalism, reporting all sides of a story. For giving voice to people who questioned the official narrative, they have been charged with “glorifying” terrorism.

It is therefore not surprising that at least nine journalists, who write for media houses in India and abroad, have quietly left the state last month. One of them, senior journalist and author Gowhar Geelani, was summoned to a Shopian court on the charge of having tweeted a story that appeared in Kashmir Observer about an encounter between militants and the police in Shopian district. It's a short story, a few paragraphs long, that states that a policeman was injured in the clash. For not appearing in court in this case, Geelani has been declared an absconder and there is a warrant out for his arrest.

None of these journalists can risk returning to their state even though being there is essential to their existence as journalists. Given what has happened to two of their colleagues, they have little confidence that they will be spared.

Routine journalism is being criminalised in Kashmir, as this story in Article 14 documents. Note that the story has no byline. That too is a fallout of the oppressive reality in Kashmir where journalists reporting on human rights issues are being compelled to write anonymously for fear of retribution by the authorities.

What is happening currently in Kashmir is a direct attack on press freedom, on the right of journalists to do their jobs, to earn their livelihood, and to report without fear or favour. If you remove that right from them, you are killing journalism. You are strangling the free press. And if you can do that in Kashmir, and get away with it because the rest of the country is too absorbed in other issues, then the experiment will be repeated elsewhere in this country. Make no mistake about that.

One of the journalists who has been compelled to leave his home state asks these questions:

“What is our crime? That we report facts on the ground? That we refuse to become mouthpieces of the administration? That we do not act as their extension arm and stenographers? What is the fault of our family members? Why are they being harassed for our professional work? Most journalists have been silenced in Kashmir. This enforced silence is aimed at killing and distorting the Kashmir story and to manufacture a false ‘all is well’ narrative.”

So, even as we wring our hands over Ukraine, as we discuss what India should and should not do, and watch videos of helpless Indian students stuck there, spare a thought for the death of journalism in Kashmir.

There is another kind of journalism in India that needs an urgent injection of investment if it is to survive, and that is environmental journalism.

Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report. What it says about India is particularly alarming.

Sea-level rise and cyclones, a direct consequence of climate change, threaten not just major coastal cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Visakhapatnam but also smaller coastal towns in Goa and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Furthermore, unplanned urbanisation in the Himalayas is a cause for concern. People living in these towns will face more frequent landslides and flooding, given increasing rainfall and melting glaciers that are already leading to flash floods.

All these concerns need to be explored by the media with stories from these regions so that the challenges posed by global warming translate into what is already happening on the ground.

There is also an urgent need for stories that look at infrastructure projects, already in the pipeline in many of the cities identified in the report, that make little environmental sense in the light of the inevitability of climate change impacts.

The multi-crore coastal road being built in Mumbai, for instance, that will benefit a tiny percentage of car users in a city where the majority use public transport, is a case in point.

Another is the Char Dham project in Uttarakhand. Despite the recommendations of the expert panel set up by the Supreme Court, and the recent resignation of its chair, Ravi Chopra, the government is hell-bent on going ahead with it.

However, except for sporadic reporting, usually triggered by protests by people adversely affected by such projects, such as the fishing community in the case of the coastal road, there is hardly any effective environmental reporting in mainstream media. One has to turn to specialist digital platforms like Mongabay, the Third Pole or the Centre for Science and Environment for such reports.

Environmental reporting cannot be done sitting in an office. Journalists need the time to investigate, to travel, to understand all aspects of the story so that they can report in a way that will have an impact on policy-making while at the same time informing the public. This is an investment the mainstream media in India, barring some exceptions, appears unwilling to make.

POSTSCRIPT:  Since I wrote this, Fahad Shah, editor-in-chief of Kashmir Walla, was on the verge of being granted bail for the third time when the police charged him under the Public Safety Act (PSA). This draconian law allows the police to keep an individual in jail for upto two years without trial. 

 

From Tripura to climate change, mainstream media needs feet on the ground to report on what’s happening

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 11, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/11/11/from-tripura-to-climate-change-mainstream-media-needs-feet-on-the-ground-to-report-on-whats-happening

All of us should be very worried about what’s happening in Tripura. If people are unaware of recent events that have taken place there, the mainstream media in India is to blame.

Bits and pieces of news have trickled out, initially only on social media, since October 26 when mobs led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad reportedly attacked several mosques and Muslim-owned businesses in the state. This was ostensibly in retaliation for the recent violence against Hindus in Bangladesh.

Why would people in Tripura respond so violently to events in the neighbouring country? Most people are ignorant about the northeastern states in general and, in this instance, about Tripura. We do not know its past or its close links with Bangladesh with which it shares a 856-km border. Despite its history, the state has not seen Hindu-Muslim clashes. The main arena of conflict has been between the tribals and non-tribals. You have to look hard for such information in mainstream media. Yet, as with all such communal conflagrations, there is a specific history as explained in this informative article by Samrat X in Newslaundry.

While the violence itself was worrying, as reported in some detail by Al Jazeera, what has followed is even more troubling. It represents yet another instance of a government, this time the state government in Tripura, weaponising laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act to curb any questioning or dissent. In what was an extraordinary and totally unjustified move, the state government slapped UAPA charges against 102 individuals including lawyers, journalists and ordinary people posting on social media that the state was literally “burning”. For stating this, the government came down with a sledgehammer.

According to a statement issued by the Editors’ Guild of India, “One of the journalists, Shyam Meera Singh, has alleged that he has been booked under UAPA for merely tweeting ‘Tripura is burning’. This is an extremely disturbing trend where such a harsh law, wherein the processes of investigation and bail applications are extremely rigorous and overbearing, is being used for merely reporting on and protesting against communal violence.”

As Indian Express pointed out in its editorial, “this appears to be a part of the playbook of heavy-handedness that has been perfected by governments. This involves the twisting of stringent laws such as the UAPA or the sedition law to quell dissent or intimidate anyone who contests or might contest the state’s version.”

As far as the media is concerned, what we are seeing in Tripura is not new. It is a pattern that is unfolding in many states, particularly those governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Enough has been written about this and yet it does not seem to discourage more governments from following this trend.

An article in the US-based Nation magazine goes as far as to state that India has “become a very dangerous place to be a journalist.” Not all journalists; only those that do their job of questioning the state.

The article quotes the findings from a recent survey of the media in India by the Polis Project called “Watch the State”. It reveals that between May 2019 and August 2021, “256 journalists were attacked for doing their job. The police appear to be the main perpetrators in BJP-ruled states, in Jammu and Kashmir, and in Delhi, where they directly report to the ministry of home affairs. The BJP-ruled states are in general significantly more dangerous for journalists than others.”

Even if some people might conclude that this an overstatement, consider this, from the same article: Unesco has ranked India as the “sixth-most dangerous country for journalism in the world, after Afghanistan, Mexico, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen.”

So, yes, Tripura is another warning to the media and all critics of the current dispensation, both at the centre and in several states.

Apart from the dangers journalists face just doing their jobs, Tripura illustrates another malaise in the media: the virtual absence of reporting on many regions, and on many subjects, until disaster strikes. I have argued in earlier columns that media houses are just not investing in news gathering. Stories like the developments in Tripura cannot be written by referring to news agency reports and adding a little bit to them. You need feet on the ground to describe, to report, to verify the developments, and to background them.

Such reporting is missing on a whole range of issues, including environmental reporting. This is more than evident in the background of the COP26, the international gathering discussing climate change in Glasgow. While some news organisations have sent reporters to cover the conference, most newspapers have limited their coverage to reports about what either the Indian prime minister or other heads of state said during the two-day summit. The real substance of the negotiations have taken place after the politicians left. There is little original reporting on that.

Politicians make promises on the international stage. They are lauded or criticised. But in this instance, the real test is how these pronouncements will play out in the context of a particular country.

In India, while the volume of reporting about climate change has increased in recent months, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory, the quality is what really matters. The reports that appear, apart from quoting politicians, are based on studies and reports by international bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But you have to work hard to find stories that tell us how people are affected, who is at the receiving end of the many impacts of global warming, and whether the steps the government has been taking are adequate.

One website that is focused entirely on environmental issues is The Third Pole. In this article, Omair Ahmed sums up the issue precisely when he writes: “Climate change has a real, powerful impact on billions of people, most of whom do not know or do not use that particular term. It is the story of thirst, poverty, hunger, deprivation and conflict caused by changes to the environment on which they depend for their lives and livelihoods. And like most things political, it is about money, how we make it, and how we distribute it.”

There you have it. Climate change is a developing story that covers all aspects of life on earth. And in India, the impacts are already being felt with 100 districts identified as being particularly vulnerable. From changes in the monsoon patterns to flash floods causing widespread destruction, almost every day there is a story to be reported of communities who survive, and those who don’t.

This is what we in the media need to be doing.

There was a time in the 1990s when several newspapers had designated environmental correspondents. Reporting on environmental issues requires specialised knowledge. Only then can a reporter covering what appears to be a natural disaster make the connections. For the ordinary reader to understand what we really mean by climate change, these linkages have to be conveyed.

This is not always easy as there are many complexities. The problems arising from global warming cannot be presented as binaries, something the media, particularly television, loves to do by pitting opposite viewpoints to create a “big fight”. And the solutions are equally complex.

There is nothing left to debate about climate change. It is here. Governments are being compelled to take it seriously. So must the media. Our job remains to inform, alert, and question.

India faces an environmental crisis, but this season’s election coverage is set to ignore it

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 4, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/03/04/india-faces-an-environmental-crisis-but-this-seasons-election-coverage-is-set-to-ignore-it

Once again, election season is upon us. In fact, in India, it never seems to end. And for some political parties, it's perennial.

From now until the results are declared for the Assembly elections in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Assam, and Puducherry on May 2, we can expect little else in media coverage apart from the political circus.

For the news media, the electoral battlefield provides endless possibilities and a chance to increase readership and viewership. Elections are guaranteed to be entertaining with every politician extracting the maximum advantage from media attention. Yet, increasingly, elections have been reduced to a few personalities; the issues that matter to the majority of voters slip into the background.

No doubt, despite the election frenzy, the coronavirus pandemic and the effort to vaccinate a large section of India's population will continue to be a part of the news cycle for some time to come as this crisis shows few signs of abating at present.

Yet, the political tamasha unleashed with the announcement of elections should not let us forget the perennials, the stories that are either told in passing, or only when there is a tragedy of such overwhelming proportions that they cannot be ignored.

Issues like hunger, poverty, unemployment, caste discrimination, inequality, atrocities against women, human rights, and persecution of minorities – the list is long. We remember, and the media addresses these, when there are atrocities, like the disturbing number of incidents involving Dalit girls being killed in Uttar Pradesh, or reports that remind us that almost a third of Indian children continue to be stunted and malnourished.

When a natural disaster occurs, such as in Uttarakhand on February 7, we are reminded that global warming and climate change are not academic issues but a living reality for people in fragile ecological zones as this interview with Ravi Chopra of the People's Science Institute in Dehradun spells out.

We remember then that these very areas have suffered in the past, that we in the media investigated and reported about those disasters and that the government appointed committees to investigate and recommend policies that kept in mind ecological factors. And that after all that, the developmental plans put in place, such as building hydroelectric projects in this fragile ecosystem, continued as if nothing had happened. Until it did again.

Even if governments have short memories and choose to forget lessons from previous disasters, the job of the media to continue to focus on some of these issues cannot be overemphasised. These issues slip from popular consciousness if our focus shifts, or disappears altogether, making it virtually impossible for the people living in such perennial disaster zones to be heard by those who make policy.

The same argument can be applied to industrial pollution and neglect of safety measures by industries using hazardous materials.

On May 7, 2020, poisonous styrene gas leaked out of the LG Polymer chemical plant at R R Venkatapuram in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. Eleven people died and hundreds were affected by the gas in the villages around the plant. The reason was malfunction in the cooling system in two chemical tanks that had been left unattended.

In the wake of the accident, the media woke up. Stories were written. We were also reminded that this accident was smaller in scale but similar in several ways to what is still called the world's worst industrial disaster: the Bhopal gas tragedy where 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate escaped from a Union Carbide plant in December 1984. Thousands of people were killed that night and many more in subsequent months and years. The health of those who survived was permanently impaired. And till today these victims of the Bhopal tragedy feel they never got justice.

But the point about remembering Bhopal was that it brought up the issue of location of industries using hazardous chemicals. The people most affected that night in Bhopal were those living in a dense settlement literally outside the gates of Union Carbide. Thirty six years later, those who suffered in Visakhapatnam were those living in close proximity to the LG Polymers plant. What has changed?

This unchanging scenario of industrial location is replicated in the way industries continue to pollute air, water and land despite environmental laws, and the existence of institutions that are tasked to ensure their implementation. This is one of the more distressing facts to emerge from the latest State of India's Environment 2021 report released by the Centre for Science and Environment, or CSE.

The Central Pollution Control Board set up a Comprehensive Environment Pollution Index, or CEPI, in 2009 with a view to monitor industrial clusters and the pollution levels around them.

Between 2009 and 2018, reports the CSE, rather than an improvement in these levels, there has been a sharp deterioration. Of the 88 industrial clusters that were monitored in this period, air quality had deteriorated in 33, water quality in 45, and land pollution had increased in 17. In other words, despite a system that kept track of whether the industries located in these places were following pollution control norms, the environmental parameters had become worse.

Surely, this is a statement not just about the inefficiency of pollution control boards, or rather their inability to enforce environmental regulation, but also the attitude of those owning industries that continue to pollute and stop only if caught and/or penalised. We also need to investigate how badly the health of people living near these polluted industrial clusters has been affected.

Going back to Uttarakhand, in 2010 the National Green Tribunal Act was passed. This was done expressly so that people affected by developmental projects, such as thermal power plants, or mining, could have a say before these projects were cleared under provisions of the Environment Protection Act 1986.

However, often poor communities do not hear about a project, or that it has been cleared, until the process is almost complete. By the time they can get organised and summon up the resources to file an appeal against such a project before the National Green Tribunal, it is often too late because a time limit has been set.

This story by Jay Mazoomdaar in the Indian Express points out how the NGT continues to dismiss appeals on minor technical grounds rather than being sympathetic to the people who turn to it. It had replaced the earlier National Environmental Appellate Authority precisely because an independent and fair system was needed to hear the complaints of project-affected communities that are often also the most marginalised. In this instance too, there is a story still waiting to be told about the groups that turned to the NGT, who they are, and how they see the future.

Environmental journalism is at the cross-section of politics, policies and people. It is challenging precisely for that reason as it asks of journalists an understanding of all this as well as technical aspects. Gone are the days when newspapers had environmental correspondents tasked to investigate and write such stories. Now it is left to dedicated organisations like CSE and its journal, Down to Earth, Mongabay India, a portal specialising in environmental and conservation related stories, or the Third Pole.

The deterioration in our natural environment, and the continuing and willful pollution of our water, air and land, takes the heaviest toll on the poor, but ultimately affects everyone. Despite this, environmental concerns have hardly ever featured in election talk or on the agenda of political parties. It is highly doubtful that the election season we have entered will see a change in this.

Should news media use the picture of the Sopore child with his grandfather’s body?

Broken News

https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/07/02/should-news-media-use-the-picture-of-the-sopore-child-with-his-grandfathers-body

Questions are being asked about the photograph of a child sitting on his grandfather’s dead body in Sopore, Kashmir. It was released on social media on July 1 after a gunfight between security forces and militants in the town. The security forces insist the man was killed by militants, while his family point out that there are no bullet marks on his car and that the image shows him lying on the ground next to it.

The human rights group Amnesty International has asked why the name of the minor was revealed and why his face was not blurred in the picture as required by the Juvenile Justice Act.

Another question: who clicked the picture? There were no journalists at the site of the killing. The picture was not taken by a professional photographer.

If a security forces personnel took the picture with his phone, why was it released on social media with details such as the child’s name? Who released it? We know that the Bharatiya Janata Party's IT Cell made full use of it on Twitter. In the context of Kashmir, many believe this is part of a propaganda war that is being waged even as shootings and killings continue.

For us in the media, clear lines have to be drawn. A picture provided by someone who aims to use it for propaganda and not a professional journalist cannot and should not be used. Most English language newspapers haven’t used it this morning, although they have carried reports on the killing.

But I can think of several instances in the past where the mainstream media has used such pictures without raising questions. Remember the 2004 picture of the body of Ishrat Jahan and three associates lying on a road near Ahmedabad? The police claimed they were "terrorists" on their way to assassinate Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat.

This is a longer debate that we in the media must engage in. But the picture from Sopore frames several issues for the media. First, the obvious need to check the source of a picture before using it. Second, unless we have permission to do so, we should always obscure the image of a civilian, especially a minor, in respect for the dead and the living. Third, particularly in a conflict situation such as in Kashmir when life itself is precarious, the choice of pictures used requires greater sensitivity.

The debate over this picture from Kashmir illustrates some other points that I make in this column.

A casualty of times such as these, when one or two issues dominate news cycles, is that other equally important subjects are either overlooked entirely, or covered in passing.
The media takes its eyes off these subjects because the immediate is always more compelling than the long-term.

Environmental issues have immediacy but also long-term consequences. The event – such as an accident, or a natural disaster – gets covered, especially when there is loss of human life. But the main story lies in the before, and the after. And this is often not pursued.
There was a time when space and time were given to researching the past and following up such stories. Beginning in the mid-1980s, major newspapers had full-time environment correspondents whose job it was to do precisely this. The aftermath of a disaster and what preceded it, the stories of negligence, of delay, of callous disregard for human life, of the conditions of the displaced, the injured, whether medical relief had reached them in time – these were as much a part of the story as the actual disaster. Such information couldn’t be marshalled in a few days. It required months of diligent follow-up, something that was actively encouraged by editors.

The environmental disaster that triggered an interest and investment in this kind of reporting was likely the Bhopal gas tragedy. On the night of December 3, 1984, nearly 60 tonnes of the deadly methyl isocyanate escaped from a tank in the Union Carbide plant, killing thousands of people and impairing many more. It’s still regarded as one of the worst industrial accidents in the world.

The story didn’t end in a day. It continued for years. It also resulted in a whole slew of environmental laws culminating in the Environment Protection Act, 1986.

The Bhopal gas tragedy also generated interest in environmental reporting and led to the emergence of many dedicated journalists who followed up on such stories. In the late 1980s, I remember, younger journalists were so fired up that they were willing to spend their own money to investigate environmental stories such as monitoring hazardous industries in the vicinity of urban centres, even if their newspapers did not back them.

In 2020, apart from dedicated environmental portals like the Centre for Science and Environment and Mongabay India, you have to look hard to find the full story behind an environmental disaster.

Take the May 7 styrene leak at the LG Polymer plant outside Visakhapatnam. Twelve people died and several hundred took ill. More than 2,000 people were evacuated from the adjoining RR Venkatapuram village.

In the immediate aftermath, partly because the plant is close to an urban centre, all media covered the accident. But there is a before and after here that's equally important because it tells us how environmental laws are routinely flouted.

When the National Green Tribunal took suo moto notice of the accident, it emerged that the plant, owned by the South Korean LG Chem, had been operating without the requisite environmental clearance from 1997 to 2019, a full 23 years. And this was no fly-by-night operator. It is the biggest chemical company in South Korea.

Also, while the original plant, established in 1961, had hardly any population in its vicinity, Visakhapatnam has since grown and spread like other cities leading to an estimated 40,000 people living near a plant that uses hazardous chemicals, something that runs contrary to environmental regulations detailed in this story in the Hindu.

The parallels to Bhopal are striking. The Union Carbide plant was established in an area that had few houses nearby. By the time the accident occurred, there was a densely populated settlement literally outside its gates. Most who lived there couldn’t escape the deadly gas that night and either died or suffered from chronic health problems. Even today, 36 years after the tragedy, there are reports that the survivors have been affected disproportionately by Covid-19 because their lungs were permanently damaged by inhaling the hazardous chemical.

The bigger industrial accidents are reported, especially when there is loss of life. But if you monitor the media closely, you find every now and then reports about some gas leak, boiler explosion, chemicals dumped in water bodies that disappear from view after the first report.

For instance, on July 1, a boiler exploded at the Neyveli Lignite Corporation’s thermal power plant in Neyveli, Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu. At the time of writing, six workers had died and 17 were injured.

Yet, on May 7, when the media had turned the spotlight on the LG Polymer plant in Visakhapatnam, a boiler blast had taken place at this same NLC thermal plant, leading to eight workers being injured. Is this a coincidence or is there a deeper story here that needs to be pursued? In this instance, it probably will be because disruption in power supply affects cities where the media is located. But had this plant been in a remote area, and not so big, one wonders if this too would have been buried after some time.

Another example of this is the leak leading to a fire at the Oil India Limited gas well in Baghjan in Assam on June 9. The backstory, documented here, tells us yet again of how environmental regulations were flouted. And the follow up stories are what happens now to the people who were displaced, to the biodiversity damaged as the operations were taking place within a 10 km radius of a national park, and whether any corrective measures will be taken in the future.

This kind of reporting will be an even greater challenge in the emerging media scene in India. Media houses are laying off scores of journalists as this article documents. Newspapers have shrunk in size and their print versions are almost unrecognisable from what they were just three months ago. Most of them are now running with a skeleton staff, all of whom are doing multiple stories. There is no room for specialisation, leave alone the kind of investigative follow-up that these kinds of stories need.

Newspapers, it was once said, were “the first rough draft of history". Unfortunately, when the environmental history of this period in India is written, there will be many gaps that perhaps will never be filled.

India is facing an environmental crisis. But you wouldn’t know from reading papers and watching TV

Broken News

 

There’s a country beyond Delhi and news beyond social media outrage. If only our media realised.

 

 

Let me begin by stating the obvious: India is not New Delhi. For the moment, at least for the media, it is.  Not so for the rest of the people in this vast and diverse country.

So even as India's capital heats up with the impending election to the Delhi Assembly, and is already on fire with the determined and seemingly unflappable opposition of the women of Shaheen Bagh to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens, there is much else happening in the rest of India.

And by that I don't mean the current fracas over comedian Kunal Kamra's monologue with Arnab Goswami on an Indigo flight between Delhi and Lucknow. The anxieties of private airlines to prostrate themselves before the Ministry of Civil Aviation will be a story long remembered.

The closest I can get to that incident and what I plan to focus on is this tweet:

 Yes, reducing your carbon footprint in the light of global warming, (not to be confused with the political heat in Delhi) requires some attention from the media. This should not be reduced to reproducing agency copy with statements by the very serious and determined Greta Thunberg, who recently told off the world's top businessmen meeting at Davos.  Or even the mention of the devastating bushfires in Australia that destroyed an estimated 16 million acres in that country.

A combustible political climate should not be an excuse to take our eyes away from the processes that could destroy the very ground on which we stand. And this could happen sooner than we anticipate as is evident from what happened in Australia. Forest fires in that country are an annual event.  But successive extremely hot summers have made parts of Australia a virtual tinderbox, and much of it went up in flames this time.

We have lessons to draw from that. Not just how we prevent the same thing happening in India, something that would be much more devastating considering the size of our population, but to pay attention to other changes occurring because of the heating up of the earth's atmosphere.

We actually have a central ministry that has appended climate change to environment and forests.  But we have still to hear any sensible plan or strategy emerging from it that relates to heeding the warnings.  A plan is in the making, we hear, but when it will be ready, and thereafter operationalised, is anyone's guess.  Meantime, an estimated 600 million people in India are at risk from the impact of global warming.  That, one would have thought is a big enough number to make the media jump to report on it.

There are always exceptions, of course, and usually these happen to be digital platforms.  IndiaSpend, for instance, did an excellent seven part series on the impact of climate change. Each of the stories was centred on people, ordinary people who are already paying the price.

Awareness about climate change has also resulted in some "good news" stories.  Yet these too are generally ignored by mainstream media.  Forests, for instance, are precious for many reasons, but more so today because they play an essential role in carbon sequestration, literally absorbing the carbon that otherwise accumulates in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming.

A charming story about how some villages in West Bengal's Purulia district got together and literally grew a forest on a mountain appeared on the website Mongabay.  This website has established itself as the go-to place for well-researched environmental stories.  These villages took the help of a local non-governmental organisation and over time reforested a mountain. This has replenished underground water aquifers, provided easier access to biomass for fuel, and restored biodiversity.  It's a story worth reading in these bleak times.

Apart from climate change stories, well-researched environmental stories have virtually disappeared from our mainstream media. There was a time, not so long ago, when many newspapers, and even some television channels, had environmental correspondents. They were given time and financial backing to investigate and write stories on the environment. And such reports do require time, as well as money. They cannot be written at a desk in an office, looking at online reports and academic studies.

During the heyday of environmental reporting, journalists also became aware that environmental stories were not just about forests and rivers; they also meant looking at government policy in terms of location of hazardous industries.  This was brought home in December 1984, when an estimated 3000 people in Bhopal were killed in just one night after the terrible accident at the Union Carbide factory. The so-called accidents in industrial plants using hazardous chemicals were the direct outcome of the indifference of both owners, and those in government designated to enforce safety standards, to the lives of workers who operated such plants.

Despite that, today we see regular reports of industrial accidents, especially in chemical plants, but there are practically no follow-up stories about why these happen with such frequency, or the cost to the workers, most often poor migrants.

Many of these stories do not require the kind of investment in time and money that stories tracking the impact of climate change do.  These are routine follow-up stories that mainstream media ought to do.  Yet, with the nature of news having been redefined to be news that sells the product, clearly the depressing tale of the dangers facing poorly paid workers in industrial estates is a non-story.

Here's a recent example. On January 11, just two hours outside Mumbai, in an industrial estate managed by the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC), there was an explosion in a chemical unit.  Eight workers were killed, another seven seriously injured. The story ran for a couple of days; the government closed down the unit, and then all was forgotten.

Only two papers, as far as I could see, did the obvious follow-up stories. Indian Express sent a reporter to the industrial estate.  He found that there were 1,100 units in the complex of whom 500 manufactured chemicals. Eighty per cent of them were small-scale units with a poor safety record. Since 2015, there had been 582 accidents in this very complex, and just in the last two years, 21 people had died, and 70 injured.

A safety auditor told the reporter: "Memory in the government, industry and public is short.  No one cares about the lives of the workers. They go to work at chemical factories everyday to feed themselves but there is no guarantee of what will happen to them at work or whether they will return."

This remark is heart-breaking, indicative of the callous indifference to human lives, especially when they are poor. To make matters worse, there is an acute shortage of safety inspectors.  So even if the government planned a safety audit in the future, as it has announced it will, there are not enough trained personnel to carry it out. 

The Hindu Business Line follow up story was even more worrying as it reported that three workers die, and 47 are injured every day in some factory in some part of India.  Data provided by the Labour and Employment Ministry reveals that between 2014-2016, 3,562 workers had died and 51,124 injured in factory accidents in India. Gujarat led in the number of fatalities followed by Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, all three being the most industrialised states.

Politics in India has become so volatile that much of the media feels compelled to keep their eyes peeled on the constantly breaking news. But in the process, we are neglecting our role of covering everything that is happening in India, including the silent processes that will lead one day to enormous natural catastrophes. 

Goodbye Darryl

I should have posted this last month but here it is anyway, my tribute to my friend and former colleague, an exceptional journalist and human being, Darryl D'Monte. (Published in Indian Express, March 19, 2019: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/goodbye-darryl-5632792/)

I never thought I would be writing an obituary about a friend and a colleague. Darryl D’Monte — journalist, author, environmentalist, human rights activist, and, above all, a good human being has passed. He died on March 16 in a hospital in Mumbai, a city he lived in, loved and fought to save from environmental destruction.

I knew Darryl for decades, as a fellow journalist with whom I worked for a short period in a newspaper, but more than that as a person with whom I shared many common concerns. Apart from his stints as an editor in Indian Express and Times of India, it is Darryl’s pioneering work as an environmental journalist that will be long remembered.

When he wrote about the Silent Valley controversy in the 1970s, where a dam would have destroyed precious biodiversity including the habitat of one of the world’s rarest and threatened primates, the Lion Tailed Macaque, the concept of “environmental” journalism was unknown. Yet, it is the controversy surrounding the dam in Kerala, and the prospect of habitat destruction, that yanked the issue away from conservation to questioning developmental policy. Eventually, the campaign to save the area led to the creation of a national park that would be excluded from the project area of the dam. In his book Temples or Tombs: Industry vs Environment (1985), Darryl has recorded this early environmental battle between the interests of saving the natural environment and the demands of development.

Although Darryl worked for much of his life in mainstream media, he never gave up his convictions on environment, human rights, civic and urban issues and on the rights of the most marginalised. Indeed, being a “committed” journalist was a label Darryl wore unapologetically. Through his reporting, he established that even if we, as journalists, have strong convictions, we can report with rigour and professionalism. His environmental reports stood out for the absence of polemics and for the thorough research that they contained. This kind of reporting set a gold standard for generations of journalists that have followed in his footsteps.

Darryl consciously mentored others. In the cut-throat competitive world in which journalists operate, this stood out then, and stands out even more now, as an unusual trait. But he was more concerned that the issues — whether to do with loss of biodiversity, destructive developmental policies, or climate change — were addressed by many more journalists than just those of his generation. By setting up the Forum for Environmental Journalists (FEJI), Darryl extended support and opened up opportunities for scores of journalists, many from outside the big metros who are not plugged into professional networks, to be trained in environmental reporting.

It is the city of Mumbai, with which Darryl was closely engaged, where he is most remembered and cherished. In Bandra, where his family has lived for generations, he was a known person, actively engaged in civic and cultural affairs — always ready to battle against insensitive and environmentally destructive developmental plans initiated by the municipality or the state government.

His book Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and its Mills (2002) is especially important from the perspective of the city’s maldevelopment: Darryl captured the indifference of the government to the rights of workers and its willingness to accede to the millowners and land sharks who only saw Girangaon (the area in central Mumbai once known for its flourishing textile mills) as prime real estate. In hindsight, what began then in terms of myopic city development has now cascaded into a situation where Mumbai has become a city in perennial crisis.

Till the end, Darryl never tired of raising the red flag on this. His most recent intervention was questioning the wisdom of building a coastal road to accommodate the needs of a small, well-heeled population owning private vehicles at the cost of the livelihoods of Mumbai’s fisherfolk, its coastal environment and the needs of the majority who have to contend daily with crumbling infrastructure. Unfortunately, the state government is determined to push ahead with the plan and the courts, so far, have not been sympathetic to the pleas of the fisherfolk.

There is never a good time for anyone to go, but this was not a good time for Darryl to go. His sane voice is needed today more than ever before. As this country hurtles towards becoming a violent and fractious society, where the voice of people at the margins is drowned, and where saving the environment is just empty words as policy forges ahead to destroy it, the passion of journalists like Darryl D’Monte is irreplaceable. One hopes the legion of younger journalists he mentored will carry forward his legacy.