India’s Shrinking Newsroom: Power, Propaganda and the Eclipse of Truth

For a long time, journalists around the world have been green-eyed at the state of the Indian media. Loud, plural, and argumentative, India has, over the years, seen its media come under attack. Political power, corporate patronage, and an efficient propaganda machine have slowly overtaken newsrooms and undermined constitutional protections of freedom of expression with clout in ownership, regulatory coercion, and a full-on campaign to delegitimize independent media. The consequences are dire for journalists who face online mobs and workplace ostracism, but also for minorities, democratic politics, and India’s image abroad.

The Ruling Compact: Media Power in India

A striking feature of Indian media today is the consolidation of mainstream news ownership by corporate houses, which are generally aligned ideologically with the ruling party. Media, whether television, digital, or print, face state dependence through advertising and discretionary regulation, as well as business cross-holdings and favors that result in self-censorship and collusion. Editorial independence is often not crushed by direct coercion but rather by the fear of tax raids, license troubles, advertising pullouts, or reputational smears.

The consequence is a compliant ecosystem that magnifies official messaging, minimizes information that might embarrass the government, and trivializes complex socio-political issues into spectacle and soundbites. Investigative journalism is shunned. Political reporting is performative and not hard on power and accountability. Journalism in this information ecosystem is not characterized by fact-checking, context, and courage but by frenetic activity and noise that creates the impression of being ‘busy’.

Architecture of Disinformation

Accompanying this media power structure has been the creation of an architecture of disinformation. Reporting by RSF on the harassment of journalists critical of the government highlights that a website such as OpIndia published 328 articles over just 13 months, between 2023 and 2025, that were either directly about journalists and independent media outlets or set off cycles of online harassment against them. It is the now familiar pattern of harassment: a journalist is critical of government policies or institutions and is then labelled “anti-national”, “foreign-funded” or a “propagandist” by a prominent media outlet or influencer, which then creates a green light for coordinated digital mobs to threaten, doxx, and intimidate journalists.

It is not random trolling: it is a networked effort in narrative warfare. The temporal relationship between article publication and spikes in harassment, amplification of hate speech and attacks by Telegram groups tied to Hindu supremacist networks, and the targeting of a small number of journalists repeatedly over time to maximize the deterrent effect can all be seen in RSF’s analysis of this harassment data. Attempts to smear watchdogs such as RSF as part of “regime change conspiracies” and other such efforts are also part of this architecture of disinformation and intimidation.

Financing disinformation

Financing is the other part of the equation. Despite policies by advertising platforms against hate speech and discrimination, the flow of advertising to several sites with histories of such speech has continued to grow, often using automation technologies that power digital ad markets to subsidize content that drives harassment campaigns, creating a vibrant disinformation ecosystem.

Ideology provides the motive, platforms the reach, and advertising technology the funds.

Minorities and the Vanishing Story

Minorities are disproportionately bearing the price of this transition. Reporting on the violence, discrimination, and everyday exclusions faced by Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and Adivasis is being shunned, reframed through a lens of suspicion, or watered down. Victims are scrutinized, but perpetrators are contextualized, humanized, and shielded. Structural issues such as housing segregation, employment discrimination, or even discriminatory policing rarely receive sustained attention in newsrooms unless these stories can be retrofitted into counter-narratives that exonerate the powerful.

The result is a public discourse that treats the sufferings of minority communities as episodic and exaggerated instead of systemic. When journalists attempt to document these everyday experiences, they are, in turn, targeted for their perceived bias and disloyalty. The chilling effect is real: many newsrooms are unwilling to take up minority-focused stories, which may anger management or prompt them to face backlash.

Kashmir and the Managed Narrative

Narrative control is nowhere more evident than in Kashmir. Kashmir has seen a prolonged internet shutdown, movement restrictions, and a legal environment hostile to independent journalism since the revocation of Article 370. Journalists themselves have been questioned, detained, and denied passports, while local voices are sidelined by national coverage, which often rehashes official briefings.

Economic precarity, psychological trauma, and curtailed civil liberties, which are the human consequences of these policies, are rarely unpacked and much less reported in the mainstream. Kashmir becomes instead a stage for nationalistic assertion rather than a place with citizens whose rights and lives merit scrutiny. In this managed narrative, the absence of authentic reporting is not accidental but the point itself.

The Eclipse of Authentic Narratives

A media ecosystem drenched in propaganda is not a home for authentic narratives. Verification gives way to virality, context is discarded for outrage, and labels replace evidence. Over time, the public learns not to expect facts from the news. Still, rather than affirmation of preconceived ideas, it corrodes trust not just in the media but also in democratic institutions, which are themselves built on the informed consent of the governed.

The popular mind shapes itself to its environment. Politics becomes polarized and punitive, dissent becomes betrayal, and complex policy debates on the economy, federalism, or social justice are reduced to moral binaries. When journalism ceases to hold power to account, power itself ceases to explain itself, and democratic functions grind to a halt.

India’s Global Disinformation Footprint

India is an essential player in the global disinformation ecosystem. Investigations have revealed content originating in partisan Indian outlets circulating in far-right networks abroad and within foreign propaganda ecosystems. Internationalization matters because it reshapes the way India is perceived, not as a democratic nation with competing ideas for its future, but as an exporter of polarizing content. For a country that aspires to be a global player, that is a strategic own goal. Soft power depends on credibility, and when journalists are harassed, watchdogs smeared, and facts contested as ideology, credibility erodes, and partners, investors, and allies take notice.

Democracy Under Pressure

The relationship between press freedom and democratic health is direct. Corruption goes unseen when journalists are silenced. Policy becomes more exclusionary when minorities are misrepresented, and the pursuit of peace in Kashmir is performative when Kashmiris are narrated without Kashmiris. The newswire documentation by RSF of harassment and intimidation against journalists must therefore be read not as a story just for the media but as a warning signal for India’s democracy.

Indian democracy was supposed to have a press that spoke truth to power. The current trajectory is its opposite: power speaking through the press, dissent outsourced to the margins and punished online.

Political and Economic Future of Minorities

The long-term consequences are clear: political marginalization begets economic exclusion, and when minority voices and concerns are absent from mainstream coverage, they are absent from policy priorities. Education, employment, housing, and security become that much harder to access for vulnerable groups in an environment where empathy is delegitimized and advocacy is criminalized.

A media that refuses to cover these stories is actively writing a future in which inequality deepens, social trust frays, and no economy thrives on exclusion and no democracy survives the normalization of intimidation.

Reclaiming the Public Sphere

Repairing the rot will not be easy. It will require diversified ownership, transparent advertising ecosystems, platform accountability, and enforceable (not just declaratory) legal protections. It will also need public clamor for a journalism that verifies, contextualizes, and refuses to be intimidated. The Indian press has not lost its talent or its tradition. It has lost the space to work freely. Restoring that space is not a partisan demand. It is a democratic necessity. Without a free press, the republic risks becoming an echo chamber. With one, India can reclaim the argumentative, plural space that it has lost in recent years.