-Newslaundry.com The boom of the 2000s met the inevitable decline of 2008, followed by a political atmosphere that was hostile to independent journalism. What caused India’s news media to become an elaborate PR machine for the government and corporates? It’s the economy, stupid. Let me unpack this a bit by comparing two numbers from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy’s monthly employment data. Five years ago, in September 2016, there were about 10.3...

India faced a second and worse wave of COVID-19 pandemic a few months back. The unemployment problem is looming large in the country. At this juncture, the country requires journalism to tell the stories of courage, of loss and grief and also of resilience, of the state of preparedness and about the efforts being made by communities, individuals, civil society and government. For better media coverage of critical issues like human...

-TheWire.in Sainath dedicated the prize to his fellow journalists who are reporting from rural India and to PARI, the news website he founded in 2014. New Delhi: Renowned journalist P. Sainath was the recipients of the Fukuoka Grand Prize 2021, one of Japan’s top awards open to people from all Asian countries for “investigate[ing] impoverished farming villages in India, listen[ing] to voices from the rural population”. The Fukuoka Prize has three categories, Academic...

India is facing a second and worse wave of Covid-19 pandemic. At this time, the country requires journalism to tell the stories of courage, of loss and grief, of the state of preparedness and about the efforts being made by communities, individuals, civil society and government. Journalists are needed to document with rigour the gaps and lacunae in governance when it appears. At the same time, journalists need to be vigilant about...

-The Indian Express For India, the latest report has blamed an environment of intimidation created by BJP supporters for any critical journalist, who, the report said, is marked as “anti-state” or “anti-national”. While India has not slipped further on the World Press Freedom Index 2021 published by the international journalism not-for profit body, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), however, it continues to be counted among the countries classified “bad” for journalism and is...