Let us bow in respect before the brave reporters — including those from far-off Kerala — who tirelessly criss-crossed the shell-ravaged border villages of Kashmir for days and nights to bring us firsthand accounts from the war front. While these young journalists and their organisations cannot be excused for the highly irresponsible-even reckless—decision to enter a conflict zone without proper training or basic protective gear, their courage and commitment deserve our salute no less than that accorded to our soldiers; regardless of how much armchair critics may pooh-pooh them.

One chilling image is unforgettable: a TV reporter crouched in a bunker without even a helmet in the pitch darkness of a curfew-bound town in Jammu, the ground shaking from relentless shelling, his voice trembling as he reports live with only a torch pointed at his face to make himself visible to viewers. These courageous journalists have held aloft the great legacy of the heroic war reporters of the past who risked their lives out of sheer commitment, duty, and sacrifice.

However, while we honour the media's courageous legacy, we must also acknowledge one of its enduring and less commendable traits: a tendency for rabid war-mongering, often without addressing the profound human suffering wars inflict on all sides. This is problematic even when India undoubtedly had every right to do what it did to teach Pakistan for the massacre of 26 innocent tourists in Pahalgam. Media shouldn't turn hostile when its enemy forces its government to enter a war. But, should it be a cheerleader and turn a blind eye to inconvenient truths? In today’s media war theatre, more than the reporters at the frontlines, the studio anchors, childish and outraged as they are, surrounded by hawkish experts and former military officers, seem most battle-ready—thumping desks, raising decibels, abusing the enemy from the safety of air-conditioned newsrooms, as if national security depended on their lung power. This has long been the norm in much of the media worldwide, including in India, whether in English or regional languages. Though not as hysterical as the rest of the Indian media, the jingoist virus has now certainly invaded the Kerala media sphere too.

This trend has intensified with the advent of television, which, more than print journalism, thrives on sensationalism. As a result, the mass media often becomes ineffective for those seeking accurate accounts of events on the frontlines, even in democracies where a free press is expected to flourish, unlike in authoritarian regimes. A 2011 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, conducted by Dwaipayan Bose, illustrates how narrow nationalism, belligerence, and subjectivity shape media narratives in India and Pakistan when reporting on each other. Such hysteria not only undermines journalistic standards but also endangers national security by pressuring governments and armed forces into rash decisions. Writes Michael Kugelman in the latest Foreign Policy on the disinformation campaign during the recent India-Pakistan conflict: “(It) inflames emotions and increases miscalculation risks. It also heightens the possibility of a boy-who-cried-wolf effect: Confronted with frequent lies, people are more likely to be sceptical about accurate news”.

Historically, media circulation and viewership have surged during crises—whether wars, epidemics, or natural disasters—as a fearful public, desperate for information, consumes whatever is offered. But war is unlike other crises. It unleashes extreme emotions—ultra-nationalism, hatred for the enemy, and blind fervour—which the media, often a mirror of prevailing public sentiment, amplifies both for emotional validation and commercial gain. In doing so, it frequently sacrifices balance, truth, and factual accuracy. During wars, the media almost everywhere often abandons its job of speaking truth to power and willingly embeds itself with its country's government and military in the name of national interest. Besides amplifying their tall claims and lampooning the enemy, it has no qualms about spreading even sheer lies. “Truth is the first casualty in war”, said the Australian journalist, Phillip Knightley, in his book on the American media’s propagandist role in wars, “The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam” (1975).

Today, even without an actual war, jingoism and communalism dominate public discourse, and the media’s hyperactivity is unsurprising. This is further intensified by the rise of social media, which thrives on emotional excess and pressures mainstream outlets to mimic its tone to remain relevant. In today’s hyper-nationalist climate, even the mildest critique of war or the role of embedded journalism is often met with hostility. The fear of being labelled “anti-national” has created an environment where conformity is prized over conscience, and silence becomes a safer choice than scepticism.

These circumstances have been reinforced even more by an unprecedented contemporary phenomenon: the rise of the post-truth era. This era is characterised by a widespread tendency to accept only those narratives that conform to personal beliefs and biases. Individuals often knowingly reject objective facts in favour of “alternative truths” that reinforce their preferred worldview. As a result, the public sphere has fragmented into isolated echo chambers and ideological silos, eroding the foundations of pluralism and critical discourse.

However, the media indulging in war hysteria is nothing new to our time. It has a long history. The most notorious early example in the modern era is the 19th-century American news baron, Randolph Hearst's open campaign in his paper, the New York Journal, for a war between Spain and Cuba. While the illustrator he sent to Cuba to draw pictures (photography was not common) of Spanish atrocities wrote to him saying he couldn't see any sign of war, Hearst shot back: You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war! Finally, when the war broke out after the newspaper’s constant whipping up of hysteria, Hearst had the temerity to run the headline: “How do you like the Journal's war!”.

How the media acted as propaganda machines not just for totalitarian but even democratic governments and their military forces during both World Wars has been amply exposed by several studies. The media’s manipulation of public opinion to support war has been comprehensively studied by Howard Zinn in his magisterial A People’s History of the United States (1980). George Creel, a journalist who headed the US Committee on Public Information, later outlined in his book. “How We Advertised America” (1920), how he led the American war propaganda by collaborating with journalists, artists, filmmakers, etc.

Perhaps, the most interesting experience of the media’s role in war is related to the Vietnam War (1955-75). The American press, which was seen as active war mongers during the First and Second World Wars, could recover some of its prestige during the latter stages of the Vietnam War when it revealed the enormous human suffering caused by the war. Perhaps, it was the first incident in history when almost the whole media actively helped the public opinion to turn against their government on war.

Being the first major war since the advent of television, the horrific scenes at the war front relayed into homes strengthened the American public's opinion to shift against the war. However, historians like Daniel C Hallin (The Uncensored War, 1986) and Jerry Lembcke (The Spitting Image, 1998) pointed out that in the early stages of the Vietnam War, the media had behaved as before, to echo official government narratives.

On the 50th anniversary of the ending of the Vietnam War, Norman Solomon wrote in The Guardian on April 30, 2025: The last helicopter liftoff from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon on 30 April 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War. The myth that news coverage turned Americans against the war persists... In fact, it was largely complicit in perpetuating the conflict”. As Solomon said, the media behaved even more pathetically in the Gulf War (1990-91) and the Iraq War (2003). It was the first instance in media history when “embedded journalism” became a respectable term under which journalists uncritically worked alongside the American army on the war front to prepare their reports. The media was not just complicit in these first televised wars that birthed the TV channel, CNN, but also sanitised and celebrated them as a grand spectacle for people to crowd in front of TV sets across the world. As the USA trumpeted their wars as the entire mankind’s “war on terror”, the American media parroted the government’s diabolical stories on Iraq’s Saddam Hussein’s arsenals of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), which were later proved baseless. The most infamous incident was the New York Times’s sacking of its Pulitzer-winning reporter Judith Miller for whose reports on Iraq’s alleged WMDs were found hollow. Another globally recognised study is by the Malayali sociologist, Mathew Kanjirathinkal and Joseph V. Hickey (1992) for Emporia State University, Kansas, which narrates how the American media went beyond being partisan or propagandist to influence public consciousness and framed the Iraq war in mythological terms as a war between good and evil to identify its leaders as virtuous and godly, and demonise its enemies as satanic.

Even as I finish writing this, a leading national news channel is airing a programme on Operation Sindoor, featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivering a forceful speech. In the background, the verse “Sambhavami Yuge Yuge” from the Bhagavad Gita plays, evoking the divine promise to incarnate whenever Dharma is under threat — to destroy evil and protect the righteous.