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Ten days ago, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its annual World Press Freedom Index, a widely respected ranking of conditions for journalism in a hundred and eighty countries and territories worldwide, and it showed two neighbors, Pakistan and India, having effectively traded places compared with 2024. Pakistan dropped from 152nd position to 158th, with RSF noting that while it has a diverse media landscape, the government and all-powerful military have heavily censored critical reporting, including via recent moves to stifle free expression online; additionally, RSF concluded that the country is one of the most dangerous in the world for journalists, with multiple murders taking place every year and the military proving willing to go to extreme lengths to silence critics. India, meanwhile, rose from 159th place to 151st—but that still makes it one of the thirty worst places on earth for press freedom, and its report card was bleak, with RSF writing that it has been “in crisis” since Narendra Modi became prime minister, in 2014. Business interests close to Modi have turned once-independent outlets into lapdogs. TV stations spread anti-Muslim hate. And RSF wrote that India is also one of the most dangerous countries for journalists physically.
At the moment the index was being released, conditions for press freedom on the ground were being challenged anew, especially in India. In late April, militants mowed down more than two dozen Indian tourists and one Nepali national in the Indian-controlled part of the disputed region of Kashmir. (India accused Pakistan of complicity in the attack, which Pakistan denied.) Two days later, members of Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party physically attacked a newspaper journalist who was covering a protest, reportedly because he asked an attendee why they were burning effigies of Pakistan and not considering the possibility of an Indian security lapse. Meanwhile, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Indian police and a Supreme Court lawyer went after pundits and satirists who commented on the attack. The Indian government, for its part, sent letters of complaint to international news organizations—including the BBC, the Associated Press, and Reuters—that described the assailants as “militants” rather than “terrorists,” and blocked more than a dozen Pakistani YouTube channels, including those belonging to established news outlets like Dawn. Pakistan has long banned Indian news sites, per the New York Times; now, it seemed, India was doing the same in reverse.
Then, last week, the situation intensified: India launched air strikes on Pakistan in response to the Kashmir attack; Pakistan responded; in the words of the Times, “the clashes quickly escalated, with both countries hitting deeper into each other’s territory than at any time in the last 50 years”; quickly, things looked to be spiraling out of control. Threats to the press escalated, too. The social platform X said that Indian officials had ordered it to block local access to some eight thousand accounts belonging not only to prominent Pakistani figures and news outlets, but also some in Kashmir and India; X said that it would comply, but only reluctantly, accusing Indian officials of censorship and encouraging affected users to seek legal redress. The government also ordered streaming services to remove video and audio content of Pakistani origin. And the website of The Wire, an independent Indian news outlet, was blocked. Eventually, officials told the site that the decision had been taken over an article reporting Pakistan’s claim to have shot down a French-made Indian fighter jet, and that the article would need to be removed, even though versions of the same information remained freely available elsewhere—including on the website of CNN, which was first to report it. The Wire complied in order to end the blockage, but called the order “unfair.”
Shortly after fighting between India and Pakistan began, authorities in Indian-administered Kashmir confirmed that they had arrested Hilal Mir, a journalist who has worked with the Turkish news agency Anadolu, among other outlets, labeling him a “radical social media user” and accusing him of disseminating “extremist/distorted content with an intention to disturb peace and promote disaffection and secessionist ideology and present India in a bad shape,” according to the Kashmir Times. (According to The Wire, Mir was detained, in part, over a Facebook post addressed to his “schizophrenic Kashmiri soul,” which read, in part, “You have been trampled upon, dispossessed, brutalised, humiliated, maimed, for no sin of yours. You are being erased.”) Since then, another journalist, Rejaz M. Sheeba Sydeek, has reportedly also been arrested for an online post criticizing India’s moves against Pakistan.
As the Times noted on Friday, the restricted media environment meant that the picture emerging of the unfolding conflict was “blurry”; Prateek Waghre, a technology researcher, told Deutsche Welle that “such restrictions create a fertile ground for confusion and false narratives to take root, as they also limit access to reliable information and reportage.” Ever since the attack in Kashmir, both countries had been seeking to control the narrative; after launching initial strikes inside Pakistan, the Indian army posted a slick graphic online announcing the name of the operation—Sindoor, after a powder that traditionally represents the marital status of Hindu women, and evoked the widows of the Kashmir attack—with one o replaced by a pot of the powder shown spilling over like blood. As the strikes intensified, each side tagged the other as the real aggressor; at one point, Pakistan flat-out denied one of its retaliations (an “astonishing” statement, per the Times). While India was busy cracking down on X, Pakistan reportedly lifted a long-standing ban on the platform; at a time of crisis, Usama Khilji, a digital rights activist in the country, noted to Agence France-Presse, “the government needed its people’s voice to be heard all around the world and not to be silenced anymore like it was before for domestic political purposes.” At one point, according to the BBC, the Pakistani military circulated footage that turned out to depict an unrelated event, forcing news agencies that had run with it to withdraw it.
Indeed, wherever it came from, disinformation quickly exploded online. Pakistani networks were fingered as coordinating some of it, including a viral claim that the Kashmir attack was an Indian false flag operation. Widely shared clips that claimed to represent fresh military action turned out to be of a plane crash in Philadelphia, or the 2020 Beirut port explosion, or the war in Gaza, or taken from a video game. The academic Indrajit Roy told the BBC that “we have jingoists on both sides of the border, and they have a huge platform on [X],” adding, “You can see how fake news, as well as some real news, gets amplified, distorted and presented in ways designed to generate hostility, animosity and hatred for the other side.” Over time, the journalist Vedika Bahl added, such misinformation trickles down “from X to WhatsApp, which is the communication tool which is most used in South Asian communities.”
Traditional news outlets spread their fair share of fake news and hyped-up outrage, too, some of it pretty laughable: the claim that the major port in the Pakistani city of Karachi had been destroyed by Indian forces, for instance, or that Islamabad had fallen. (“It wasn’t, we know,” Shahzeb Ahmed wrote of the first claim, in Dawn. “We had shrimp karahi and grilled Red Snapper at a restaurant adjacent to it.”) Kalpana Sharma of Newslaundry, an independent Indian site, accused government-aligned TV channels of engaging in “disinformation, misinformation, drama and ear-splitting decibel levels,” and asked whether officials’ failure to rein them in reflected a need to whip up “ultranationalist fervor” without being seen to do so; in Dawn, Ahmed indicted Indian media, too, wondering “how dim-witted you have to be to cheer a war between two nuclear-armed countries.” In an editorial published on Saturday, Dawn wrote that the “suspension of disbelief required to follow the Indian media these days must qualify as an extreme sport”—but noted that the Pakistani media was not innocent either. “A few television channels and the so-called experts featured on them have been acting irresponsibly,” the editorial read. “They must avoid unconfirmed or unverified reports and concentrate more on sensible reporting.”
Through it all, some journalists, of course, have tried to report through the noise, despite facing restrictions. Sharma, of Newslaundry, praised the Kashmir Times for putting out daily stories detailing the sharp impact of the fighting on residents close to the line separating the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir; Anuradha Bhasin, the high-profile managing editor of the paper, was among those to have their X accounts blocked by government order. Separately, Newslaundry profiled Mohammed Zubair, a fact-checker, whom the outlet called “the key face of the counter-propaganda effort” as false claims blew up on both sides; yesterday, Zubair said on X that his address and phone number had been leaked online by hostile actors, and that he’d received threats against his life. In Dawn, Ahmed praised The Wire for standing out “in a sea of yes-men” in India, for “refusing to lap up the hateful rhetoric and trying to tell the full story.” He wrote just as it was being banned.
Over the weekend, the US—which had previously suggested it wouldn’t get involved, but seemingly grew alarmed at the pace of escalation and the proximity of nukes—did so and brokered a truce, which appears to have held since, even if fears persist and disinformation continues to flow. Tensions between India and Pakistan are not new, of course. Nor are the media dynamics that can inflame them; as Fiaz Pampori observed in the Kashmir Times yesterday, “whenever India and Pakistan show even a faint sign of moving toward peace, a familiar and unfortunate pattern unfolds—television studios on both sides of the border erupt into noisy, divisive debates featuring so-called experts whose main aim appears to be provocation, not reconciliation.” While the proliferation of online junk is newer than TV, the dynamics that have surrounded it in recent days—the muzzling of X accounts in India; videos of an old thing purporting to show a new thing—are by now familiar. And yet the mix of old and new information technology—as was perhaps also the case with military technology—appears to have created a particularly volatile, scary, and confusing atmosphere around this recent burst of fighting, the outcome of which could have been, and could yet be, much more drastic. “There is so much fog of war now,” one analyst, Milan Vaishnav, told the Washington Post. “The full picture may never really emerge.”
Other notable stories:
- AI has also been a factor in the spread of disinformation around the India-Pakistan conflict, as it continues to reshape our broader information environment. All this week, online and in this newsletter, CJR is running a series of pieces on this transformational impact as it pertains to the news media ecosystem. Yesterday, Mike Ananny and Matt Pearce canvassed industry leaders on how they’re thinking about making use of the technology. This morning, Laura Preston reflects on the experience of getting her news from ChatGPT. “Reading, that dreadful, plodding chore of olden days, could be made efficient: instead of articles, it would give you snappy rundowns that you could scan quickly then cough up later,” she writes. “And yet ChatGPT made studying current events an interminable and fruitless occupation.”
- Yesterday, Hasan Piker, a progressive new-media personality with a huge audience, claimed that he was stopped and questioned for hours while reentering the US over the weekend, and that immigration officials asked him about his political beliefs, including his views on President Trump and Israel, and whether he had ever engaged with Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis. (Piker is Turkish American; he was born in the US and was traveling under the Global Entry program for low-risk travelers.) Piker said on a livestream that it was obvious the officials knew who he was, and that while they were “cordial,” he believed they were seeking a pretext to detain him permanently. (The administration denied that Piker was stopped due to his beliefs.)
- The New Yorker’s Clare Malone explored the current turmoil at the Washington Post, where the owner, Jeff Bezos, has ruffled feathers with moves that have been interpreted as designed to appease Trump, and staff dissatisfaction with his handpicked leadership is growing. “Dozens of staffers have left the Post in recent months,” Malone reports, and have attributed their departures, in exit interviews, to the “lack of a discernible plan for the paper” under Will Lewis, the CEO. After Malone’s piece came out, the paper lost another high-profile journalist: the humor writer Alexandra Petri, who, like several other former Posties, is joining The Atlantic.
- I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter about the new American pope, Leo XIV, and his early remarks about AI. As I was writing, Leo held his first papal audience with members of the news media and urged them to tone down divisive rhetoric: “Let us disarm communication of all prejudice and resentment, fanaticism and even hatred,” he said. “Let us free it from aggression.” He also called for press freedom to be respected and for journalists jailed around the world to be freed, before meeting some members of the audience. (He declined a selfie, but did sign a baseball.)
- And during a presentation to advertisers yesterday, NBCUniversal unveiled a first look at The Paper, a mockumentary about a fictional Midwestern news outlet, the Toledo Truth-Teller, that is set to debut on the streaming service Peacock in September and is set in the same universe as the American Office. The character of Oscar, played by Oscar Nuñez, is returning from that show, while Sabrina Impacciatore will play an editor and Domhnall Gleeson an idealistic new hire.
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