Criticism is often hard to take and no less for an entire country.
May 3 is World Press Freedom Day and India, though it has seen a slight improvement, still languishes low in the press freedom index, ranked just 151 in the world in 2025, up from 159 last year and 161st in 2023.
The ranking is prepared by the organisation Reporters Without Borders (known by its French initials RSF). Despite the incremental improvements in the last few years, India is still in what the RSF dubs the “very serious” category of nations for press freedom.
Among our neighbours, India trails behind Nepal (90th), Maldives (104th), Sri Lanka (139th) and Bangladesh (149th), though it is ahead of Bhutan (152nd), Pakistan (158th), Myanmar (169th), Afghanistan (175th) and China (178th). There are a total of 180 countries assessed in the index.
One of India’s problems is the increasing concentration of media ownership among politically connected individuals.
Meghalaya, of course, has its own particular challenges when it comes to ensuring media freedom. On the one hand, the state does well in that the traditional media is given generous access to politicians and civil servants and is able to put questions freely to those in power. However, often the tough questions are not asked and this is for a number of reasons – journalists in the state are by and large paid peanuts. This does not attract highly qualified or educated individuals to the media space. Many receive little to no formal training in journalism before they are sent out into the field to gather news.
Media houses are small and short-staffed to cut costs. This means that journalists cover several beats at once, work for more than one publication or news channel at a time and thus do not have the ability to ask difficult questions or do enough digging. Editors on the desk often do not have the time or the inclination to sift through endless press releases and sometimes publish them verbatim instead of parsing them properly. The age of 24×7 news and social media also means that reporters are pressured to break news quickly rather than do in-depth reportage.
The other major issue is a sensitive one even within the media fraternity – money. As was mentioned earlier, Meghalaya journalists, in general, are paid pittances and it is not uncommon for politicians, pressure groups and other organisations to offer a little cash for tea or petrol expenses. When does this morph into something completely unacceptable? There is a very fine line and it is easy (and tempting) to cross it.
This year’s World Press Freedom Day theme is ‘The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Press Freedom’. Readers may not know it, but many local reporters are already making use of AI to tidy up their stories but this often has the effect of reports across different newspapers and websites all sounding more or less the same. Although it is still some way in the future, there could come a time when AI produces news all on its own – would we trust the computer chip over the human being?
