Peerzada Masrat Shah
Accountable journalism has a job description. It examines policy. It verifies claims. It questions people who hold power. It gives readers enough context to judge a complicated dispute for themselves.
Some broadcast segments do none of that.
A programme opens with a defence of democratic institutions. It runs for ten minutes. It carries no documents, no figures and no opposing voice. The question that follows is fair. Is this reporting, or is it advocacy with a studio backdrop?
The case for the politicians
Start with the argument that deserves a hearing.
Elected leaders are entitled to press their state’s case. That is the job voters gave them. Under the Constitution, states carry direct responsibility for police, public health, agriculture and local administration. Money works differently. Tax devolution, centrally sponsored schemes and borrowing limits are settled largely in Delhi.
So a chief minister who disputes a funding formula is not automatically disloyal. Nor is one who travels abroad to court investors. Regional interest is a legitimate beat. It calls for reporting, not a loyalty test.
Experience and training matter too. A leader who can read a finance commission report, brief foreign investors and argue a technical case is doing part of the work. None of that proves the argument is right. It only means the argument should be tested rather than ridiculed.
The case for scrutiny
The microphone has duties on its own side.
When a newsroom spends more airtime protecting a political line than probing it, viewers are entitled to ask who is holding whom to account.
Audience data suggests many have stopped asking. They have simply left.
What the numbers show
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published its Digital News Report in June 2026. It surveyed close to 100,000 people in 48 markets.
Trust in news worldwide now stands at 37 percent. That is the lowest reading since the institute began tracking the measure in 2015. Trust dropped in 29 of the 48 markets surveyed.
India recorded 39 percent, a fall of four points in a year. That places the country 18th of 48. Fifty-eight percent of Indian respondents said they worry about false information online. Fifty-two percent said they avoid the news at least some of the time.
One caveat belongs with those figures. The Indian sample covers mainly English-speaking online users. It is not nationally representative, and it under-counts the reach of television and print.
Editors reacted to the trust figure with visible discomfort. Dhanya Rajendran, editor-in-chief of The News Minute, said at the report’s India launch that “alarm bells are ringing in my brain as to how we salvage the situation”.
The wider pattern is a slow retreat from news itself. The share of people describing themselves as very or extremely interested in news has fallen from 59 percent in 2021 to just under 46 percent. Casual or passive users have risen from 16 percent to 25 percent over the same period. Globally, 42 percent now say they avoid news at least sometimes, against 29 percent in 2017.
Where audiences go instead is no mystery. For the first time, social and video platforms have overtaken both television bulletins and news organisations’ own sites and apps. Fifty-four percent of respondents get news that way. Seventy-seven percent watch online news video every week. Mitali Mukherjee, who directs the institute, describes the shift as the “platformisation” of news.
Creators have filled part of the gap. Respondents rate them as more entertaining, easier to follow and more relatable than newsrooms. They also rate them as less trustworthy and less impartial. Only 3 percent of people worldwide rely on creators alone.
That combination is the warning. Audiences are not choosing creators because they trust them more. They are choosing them because the alternative feels no more reliable and far less watchable.
Pressure from outside the newsroom
Credibility is not lost only through choice. Reporters Without Borders placed India 157th of 180 countries in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, down from 151st a year earlier. India’s score slipped from 32.96 to 31.96.
The organisation cited violence against journalists, heavily concentrated media ownership and outlets with increasingly open political alignment. It concluded that “press freedom is in crisis” in the country.
The global picture is bleak too. More than half of the 180 countries assessed, 52.2 percent, now fall into the difficult or very serious categories. The legal indicator declined most sharply, which the group attributes to national security laws, anti-terror statutes and lawsuits used against reporters.
Two pressures therefore point the same way. One comes from outside the newsroom. The other is self-inflicted.
What accountability looks like in practice
None of this is fixed by a studio panel about the sanctity of institutions. It is fixed by routine work that can be checked.
Publish the document behind the claim. Name the source, or explain why the name is withheld. Put the accusation to the person accused, then carry the reply at length. Log corrections with a date, and keep the log public. Disclose ownership. Disclose government advertising revenue.
Apply one standard to state governments and to the central government. Report a chief minister’s spending record with the same rigour applied to a union minister’s. Cover opposition parties, bureaucrats and courts on the same terms.
Then cover the press itself. A newsroom that never examines its own industry is asking for a trust it has not earned.
The unresolved question
Reducing federal disputes to studio theatre does generate attention. Attention and journalism are not the same product.
When audiences describe a news channel as something they watch for amusement, that is a verdict rather than a joke. It records the moment a news organisation stopped being read as an institution and started being read as a performance with political costume.
Democracy loses something specific at that point. Not the audience, which stays for the noise, but the referee. Citizens can disagree about policy and still settle a dispute if they share a record of what happened. Without a trusted record, every argument becomes a contest of volume.
The figures above set out the scale of the problem. They do not answer the question underneath it.
Is this journalism serving the public, or politics serving itself through journalism?
In many newsrooms, the difference now rests on what happens before the microphone is switched on.
