Media Misworks
The media, as readers can see, plays a key role in this process of creating public opinion through sensational and communally charged stories.
Of late, ‘Maulana’ Shahabuddin Razvi Bareilvi, who claims to be the president of the All India Muslim Jamaat, has emerged as a favourite of several mainstream media channels by dint of his consistency in making controversial statements.
Alt News ran a deep-dive investigation tracking Razvi’s comments and uncovered a pattern in how news channels used his statements to manufacture news, drive news cycles and spur communal debates. The chronology is as follows:
- Initial contact: News agencies cover Shahabuddin Razvi Bareilvi’s controversial remarks. This makes it a topic of discussion.
- Sensationalization through tweets: News agencies then tweet Bareilvi’s statement to ensure it gets circulated quickly. This leads to social media users resharing and reacting to it.
- Reaction by politicians: News agencies approach religious leaders and members of various political parties to cover their reactions to Bareilvi’s statement and further sensationalize the issue.
- Syndicated feed gets used by media outlets: The statement is then distributed to syndicated media partners, further increasing its reach across various platforms. This makes it a trending topic of discussion and guarantees wide circulation.
- Prime-time programmes/debates: The remarks become a hot topic in prime-time TV debates/programmes, where news channels invite so-called religious experts and politicians to discuss Bareilvi’s comments. This often fuels further polarization
Once, the debates and ‘news’ cycles born out of contentious remarks by the self-proclaimed ‘Maulana’ acquire a life of their own, they shape newer narratives around the Muslim community, often presenting them in a poor light. The media, as readers can see, plays a key role in this process of creating public opinion through sensational and communally charged stories.
10/06/2025
Earlier this year, the sight of Indians deemed “illegal” by the US government under President Donald Trump and peremptorily sent back in a US military aircraft to India, manacled and shackled, created widespread outrage in the country. Headlines like ‘Indian Illegal Migrants Deported From US Tell Their Tales Of Abuse’ marked the accompanying flood of media coverage.
In sharp contrast, the Indian government’s renewed attempts to push out Rohingya and Bangladeshis who have fled to India, into the shadow lands and waters bordering neighbouring countries, have been met by a conspicuous media silence. https://thewire.in/media/backstory-disappearance-of-media-stories-on-disappeared
The forced evacuation of such a large cohort is alarming in a democratic country. It signals a breakdown of moral and ethical codes that had at one point in its history marked the country’s response to those seeking shelter within its shores for their survival.
There are five reasons why such developments do not capture empathetic media attention and why stories of the disappeared are literally disappeared from media coverage.
31/05/2025
The first aspect that emerges frontally from such an exercise is a paradox. An institution that paints itself as patriotic, which is the first to call out the “anti-Indianness” of its peers, has in fact betrayed the country conclusively time and again during this entire period, doing irreparable damage to India’s image in the process.\https://thewire.in/media/backstory-indias-media-betrayed-country-war-time
What also emerges is the fact that in the end, after the shouting stopped, it was not the interests of the country that really mattered for this powerful section of the media, but the advertising spin-offs. TRPs can be tyrants, they can smash every bit of love for Mother India right out of the park.
Finally, the reportage of this period, especially of news television, only confirmed that time-honoured journalistic norms like accuracy, verifiability, fact checking, the seeking of trusted sources and the correcting of mistakes, have been replaced by rumour, speculation, spectacle and crude jingoism.
17/05/2025
Despite the military's technological prowess and tactical victories, India's international standing collapsed under the weight of reckless media sensationalism, diplomatic overreach, and the unchecked proliferation of communal hate speech that alienated potential allies. https://thewire.in/media/how-indian-media-sabotaged-its-own-war-efforts
Why did no country stand with us in those four crucial days, like China, Turkey and Azerbaijan did for Pakistan? Why was the International Monetary Fund able to sanction another one billion dollars for Pakistan in the midst of its nuclear sabre-rattling? Why was Trump again able to hyphenate India and Pakistan and throw in the mediation spanner in the works, knowing fully well our historical opposition to it? Why did the international reporting of those four days favour the Pakistani version of events rather than ours?
The answer, perhaps, lies in what Arun Shourie told Karan Thapar in an interview on May 13, that “the Indian media has destroyed our credibility.” With, may I add, not a little help from the government and its right wing cohorts. This ensured that we lost the global perception war.
Media (particularly television) reporting since the Pahalgam incident has been (again in the words of Shourie) no less than “a crime against the country”.
The misreporting of the conflict crossed all limits of fakery, dishonesty and war mongering, studios were converted to mendacious war-rooms where all manner of fiction was concocted: the destruction of Karachi port, the occupation of Islamabad, the imminent fall of Rawalpindi, even the bombing of Kirana Hills and Pakistan’s nuclear installations and the release of radiation (denied by the Indian Air Force and the International Atomic Energy Agency, respectively). Every single hour these channels contradicted the official briefings in Delhi, causing confusion, panic and loss of our credibility internationally.
by Avay Shukla
19/05/2025
In the wake of the April 22 Pahalgam massacre, a former BSF officer exposes how agenda-driven media coverage has deepened anti-Muslim sentiment, diverted attention from security failures, and undermined India’s pluralist fabric.
A Tragedy Twisted: How Media Fuels Communal Hate After Pahalgam - The Wire
The media, instead of focussing on the Hindu/Muslim angle, should have asked how such an act could be carried out by militants without intelligence agencies detecting their footprints – electronic or otherwise.
Another question that the media should have asked is how and why there was no security – not even police – at a popular tourist place that was reportedly witnessing a gathering of a large number of tourists on a daily basis.
While reports of the selective killings of Hindus in Pahalgam are perhaps correct to an extent, giving this exclusive coverage at the cost of the alternative narrative expressed by tourists has provoked unscrupulous elements of society to harass and harm Muslims in many parts of the country.
02/05/2025