This week, Pakistani media is running measured analysis on Field Marshal Asim Munir’s calls with US President Donald Trump, Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar’s shuttle diplomacy and the extraordinary tightrope walk between Washington, Tehran, Riyadh, and Beijing. Indian media is running wall-to-wall coverage of the same story, oscillating with impressive speed between fury, denial and indignant cope.

The asymmetry is not new. It is a documented pathology with an international paper trail.

Pakistan appears on India’s front pages every single day. Every channel. Without fail. When this obsession reached its operational peak during Operation Sindoor in May 2025, the results were documented by institutions that cannot be dismissed as hostile to India.

The New York Times ran a piece titled “How the Indian Media Amplified Falsehoods in the Drumbeat of War.” It reported that during a live military conflict between two nuclear-armed states, mainstream Indian news outlets engaged in the widespread dissemination of fabricated information, with “even credible journalists and mainstream news outlets running straight-up fabricated stories,” quoting Sumitra Badrinathan of the Reuters Institute.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford published a detailed investigation titled Truth is the Casualty, documenting how Indian television “looked like an animated video game, with graphics and crude sounds”. The BBC and France 24 explicitly criticised Indian newsrooms for breaking journalism norms.

The Al Jazeera Media Institute called the coverage “a national embarrassment that undermined journalistic integrity”. Columbia Journalism Review covered it under the headline “The Fog of War in India and Pakistan.”

Amid a key military exercise by the Indian armed forces, media outlets shared unverified videos, amplifying misinformation. ABP, Aaj Tak, News18 & Zee, among others, used footage of Gaza airstrikes in 2023 as visuals of Operation Sindoor. | @Shinjineemjmdrhttps://t.co/sJ6rdK1gQJ— Pratik Sinha (@free_thinker) May 7, 2025

Amid a key military exercise by the Indian armed forces, media outlets shared unverified videos, amplifying misinformation. ABP, Aaj Tak, News18 & Zee, among others, used footage of Gaza airstrikes in 2023 as visuals of Operation Sindoor. | @Shinjineemjmdrhttps://t.co/sJ6rdK1gQJ

What these outlets documented was specific. Times Now Navbharat reported that Indian forces had entered Pakistan. Zee News reported that the Indian Army had captured Islamabad and that Pakistan had surrendered. One channel reported that INS Vikrant had attacked Karachi port.

A video of a plane crash in Philadelphia in January 2025 was broadcast as footage of an Indian airstrike on Pakistani targets. Israel’s Iron Dome intercepting rockets in 2021 was aired as live footage from Jaisalmer. A Turkish military rescue photograph from 2016 was presented to Indian viewers as evidence of a captured Pakistani pilot.

The Indian authorities, simultaneously, blocked 8,000 Twitter accounts, shut down Pakistani YouTube channels, and arrested a freelance journalist for what they described as disseminating “distorted content”.

India’s government response to the New York Times investigation was to accuse the newspaper of holding a personal grudge against Narendra Modi. A spokesperson for the Congress party, from within India, wrote publicly that “all sensible people in the world have lost faith in the reports of India’s mainstream media”.

This is not a media criticism. It is a documented........

© Scroll.in