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