Journalism in India is a joke at this point.

We share the same parents. My mom is a tenured professor at WhatsApp university, with a paper in YT sensationalism

Someone please tell parents too 🙏 They have started believe YT videos now, after WA forwards

Been almost a decade since national news channels started picking up tweets as news. That's how Twitter went on to become a powerful medium despite having the least user count among all the popular social media in India. An entire narrative can now be spun by just using a few influencers and bots thereby creating an echo chamber, and news channels would just grab them and take it further to the masses.

I’m a journalist, and I agree the state of media currently isn’t great.

However, there are other nuances people outside the industry rarely understand. In Poonam Pandey’s case, it was something that came from her official account and her manager confirmed.

News like that is time sensitive and competitive. Something coming from officials channels is taken as trust worthy, while at the same time, the source is also mentioned within the story.

There are multiple stages in which a story develops. The first one is to immediately report what we know - if it is coming from her official insta account, we say as much to the reader.

Then reporters try to reach out to the source and find out what are the later developments. If they were intentionally doing this, Poonam’s team would completely cut off any communications with media.

And yes, with some more time, reporters would try to dig in more and try to verify it and update the story. But a news organisation cannot wait until they see someone’s dead body to report it right? by then the news would be stale and one would lose out to competitors.

A reader need should also take some effort the see the whole story (which cites the source etc.) and not just skim through headlines. And yes, headlines are being made sensational now for more clicks. That’s sadly the state of affairs - in a digital world, competition intensity is much higher and nobody is willing to pay for news.

The worst offender is wire, which intentionally spreads fake news. They reported that US has banned the sales of drones to India due to the pannum assassination. The very next day, US government approved the sales

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68150918.amp

I have started showing Ravish’s show to my Mom 🤣🤣🤣

My mom keeps watching random videos about how to improve health. Binge watch. And then giving us that knowledge It's just bs content.

So media houses in India have suddenly women up to SEO and making money through affiliates etc. Partly its because main line spending is getting reduced and print ads are just not as cool for corporate anymore. They're putting as many ads as possible and that means as many articles as possible. You will be getting a lot of at mass content that's low quality and unresearched.

Young generation is getting news before MSM on social media, MSM is just following Social Media.

This is internet age,in many case things are happening over internet first then later on ground so they are just doing their job.

Classic case of verify and don’t sensationalise or OMG THIS IS 4 THE CLICKZZ

At the end of it, media houses are for profit machines and anything that drives traffic and conversion to justify advertiser metrics is put above all else.

So what are rhetorical alternatives? State controlled and verified news (easy to manipulate and become a tool of propaganda) or free market journalism that starts out idealistic but succumbs to the pressure of having to engage a largely online crowd

Nothing new, just assume all headlines have more to them and believe nothing. Only financial news backed by sound data is worth believing