In a Valley where one forwarded clip can empty a market, shut a school or put a stranger in danger, checking before sharing is no longer journalism’s chore alone. It is a civic duty.
Kashmir has always lived close to rumour. In a place where information has often been scarce, slow or suspect, the fastest story wins — and the fastest story is rarely the true one. What has changed is the machinery. A claim that once took a day to cross a mohalla now crosses the Valley in ninety seconds, arriving with a video attached and nobody to answer for it.
The pattern is by now familiar. After the Pahalgam attack of April 2025, the internet filled within hours with clips presented as footage from Baisaran — many of them old, some lifted from other countries, a few manufactured outright. The damage was not confined to timelines. Kashmiri students in other states found themselves answering for fabrications they had no hand in. Every summer, the Amarnath Yatra draws its own harvest of falsehood: announcements of cancellation that no authority ever issued, warnings of attacks that never occurred, each one unsettling pilgrims and the thousands of Kashmiri families whose entire season’s earnings ride on them.
Older episodes should have taught us more than they did. The salt panic emptied shops overnight on the strength of a rumour and left households paying absurd sums for a kilo of common salt. The braid-chopping scare spread by WhatsApp until whole neighbourhoods sat awake with sticks, and some of the men beaten in the dark turned out to be passers-by. No enemy organised those nights. We arranged them ourselves, one forward at a time.
The cost is measurable. Rumour brings shutters down, closes schools, strands ambulances behind hastily gathered crowds, and hands the administration a ready argument for the connectivity curbs that then punish the careful along with the reckless — and nobody suffers a suspension more than a working reporter or a student sitting an online exam.
Police advisories and FIRs have their place, but prosecution after the fact cannot outrun a lie already delivered to a lakh phones. The remedy sits earlier in the chain. Officialdom must accept that silence is itself a form of publishing: when no credible statement arrives in the first hour, the vacuum is filled by whoever shouts loudest. A prompt, plainly worded, verified update is cheaper than a curfew.
The press carries the heavier share. Being first is worth nothing here; being wrong once costs a newspaper the only asset it owns.
And readers must own their part. Before forwarding, ask three questions: Who is saying this? When was it filmed? What if it is false? In this Valley, the answer to the last is seldom nothing.
