“The first casualty when war comes is truth,”
Hiram Johnson
The 23rd Governor of California (1911–1917) and US senator (1917–1945), Hiram Johnson, coined this phrase during World War II. It has remained true ever since.
The India-Pakistan Conflict of 2025
With the recent conflict between India and Pakistan, jingoism between the two countries took precedence over facts when it came to media reporting, publishing, and comprehending the situation overall. Decades of painful memories and the scars of partition, with lingering questions about Osama Bin Laden’s ties with Pakistan, festered in silence. Lack of communication and blocked media deepened this divide. India acted like Freud’s superego, strict and judgmental, suppressing inconvenient truths, while Pakistan tried to confront its past more openly. Yet, without honest dialogue, hidden tensions simmered beneath the surface, waiting to ignite.
On April 22, 2025, in India-occupied Kashmir, 24 people (confirmed) were killed by open fire on a group of tourists. The attack took place in Baisaran meadow in Pahalgam, a Muslim majority tourist destination in Kashmir, southeast of Srinagar. Among the victims, the majority were civilians and reported to be Hindu, the most, then Christians, and the least were Muslims in number. The Resistance Front (TRF), which is believed to be an offshoot of the Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, claimed responsibility for the attack. Immediately after this news, Pakistan and its forces denied any involvement in the act and sympathized with the victims.
However, India soon acted and suspended India’s participation in the Indus Waters Treaty, a 1960 pact between India and Pakistan to govern the shares of the waters of the six Indus Basin rivers. The Attari-Wagah crossing in Lahore was closed with immediate effect, the SAARC Visa Exemption Scheme (SVES) granted to Pakistani citizens was cancelled, and military, naval, and air advisers in the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi were ordered to leave India within a week. Thus, India launched Operation Sindoor, attacking Pakistan, which was followed by Pakistan’s Operation Bunyan um Marsoos.
This conflict, which intensified after the Pahalgam attack, did not begin recently. It has persisted since 1947, with the Kashmir issue remaining unresolved. The fog of war often overrides ethical journalism principles, such as truthfulness and fact verification. This paper compares cross-border reporting to explore whether the two nations, separated by political boundaries but sharing cultural and social norms for over seventy-eight years, differ or align in their journalistic approaches.
Hyperbole and Vitriol in the Media
Indian media widely criticized Pakistan for using an anti-Muslim and Islamophobia narrative. They employed sensationalist headlines and called for retaliation. This war-mongering dominated nearly every Indian news broadcast channel. For instance, Zee News, on its official YouTube channel, falsely claimed that Indian forces had occupied Islamabad and that Pakistan had surrendered. These false reports aired not only on social media but also on broadcast television, misleading large audiences with fabricated half-truths.
Pakistani media, though somewhat behind in spreading misinformation, also contributed by sometimes failing to verify facts in their pursuit of higher ratings during the India-Pakistan conflict. For example, Aaj News broadcast a live report of a military strike destroying Karachi Port. In reality, no such attack occurred. This false footage went viral and caused widespread panic among Pakistanis.
The most exaggerated claim causing a media frenzy in Pakistan was aired by ABP News, which reported that General Asim Munir, the Pakistan army chief, had been arrested and captured by India. Indian media deliberately created “constructive chaos” against Pakistan and its forces. They based this on the claim that the Pahalgam attack was the responsibility of Lashkar-e-Taiba, also known as Jama’at-ud-Da’awa, an Islamist militant group founded in Pakistan and led by Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, asserting that Pakistan’s forces were behind the attack.
Verification Challenges
In the age of AI and when it’s easier to use ChatGPT to get our work done than to use our brains, crises like the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack brought out the greatest minds for the worst of work: to fabricate the truth and cause terror. The intentions of these people or organizations are a question mark; whether it was state-narrated or whether these people need immediate psychiatric help, it’s a mystery.
This excess of disinformation during the unfolding drone attacks and situation between India and Pakistan created a flood of information where verification and fact-checking took a back seat. India promptly blamed Pakistan and its forces, employing harsh rhetoric in major media outlets. For example, the Times of India referred to Pakistan as “terror machines” and a “terrorist state,” while the Economic Times labeled Pakistan a “safe haven for terrorists.” These accusations were based solely on an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir carried out by a militant group operating from Pakistan but without any known connection to the Pakistani state or its agencies.
Conversely, Pakistani media condemned what they called India’s exaggerated news reports. Waseem Badami, a Pakistani news anchor, on ARY News YouTube live feed, sharply criticized Indian media’s misinformation, highlighting the absurdity and false claims as shown in Figure 2, by stating, “While they were claiming a takeover of Karachi at 3:00 a.m., Burns Road was full of people eating Niharis,” accompanied by live footage showing the street bustling with activity.
The lack of verification and the censorship across border reporting led to a flood of unverified claims. During the conflict, people who questioned the armed forces or their strategies got their accounts blocked on X. Over 8,000 accounts, including those of prominent Pakistani journalists like Hamid Mir and Najam Sethi. Additionally, Indian news portals like Maktoob Media, The Kashmiriyat, and The Wire were among the blocked accounts too.
Throughout the night, Pakistani citizens responded to the tense situation by creating memes that mixed humour with the grim reality of the long-standing conflict between the two nations. This avalanche of memes, reshared by the Indian media, such as on the live feed of India Today, while lightening the mood, also exposed the dark history of terrorism and repeated India-Pakistan conflicts that have turned serious crises into subjects of satire.
Ethical Violations
In the fun and the blame, objectivity, truth free of assumptions, died. Violating the Society of Professional Journalism (SPJ) Code of Ethics and graphic images of the deceased and their body parts were aired shamelessly without warning, as shown in the Indian news story below:
This image, though censored on their YouTube channel, was posted without blurring the face on Reddit and focused more on the woman sitting with the body. In this context, women became a central focus of meme culture and graphics, used strategically to further political points and deepen ideological divides. Their portrayals were manipulated to reinforce narratives, with the memes serving as tools to sway public opinion and fuel nationalistic sentiments.
The reporting on this conflict was timely, but mostly echoed the voices of the army and security forces. “Journalists assume they think they’re free while they’re self-censoring. And that to me is a far more worrying trend,” said Leena Reghunath, a senior journalist, during a Newslaundry’s podcast on YouTube about the Pahalgam conflict. The reporting lacked analytical depth and ethical responsibility, only reporting what the official statements of army officials were or what they tweeted about it.
Theoretical Framework and Its Relevance
When media is used in cases of wars or conflicts like the one under discussion, there are only two outcomes: One is Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of the Silence Theory, which is seen in some cases, like the self-censorship in the reporting of the Palestine conflict. This theory, which says that individuals will remain silent if they believe their opinion is unpopular, while those who perceive their opinion as dominant will speak out, is not visibly seen in the Indo-Pak post-Pahalgam conflict.
The Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model, presented in their book, “Manufacturing Consent,” is applied, which is also the way the media react most of the time. This model proposes how media manipulates the minds of the social, economic, and political attitudes of the masses through propaganda by five general classes of “filters.”
These determine the type of news that is presented in the news media. In this case, the majority of media outlets are owned by large conglomerates, and even when they are not, the Pakistani government, which depends on the military, provides the funding for these news outlets. They must therefore follow the rules to keep their engines running, and this is reflected in the concentrated voices that the news channels broadcast, serving only as mouthpieces of the state’s will.
The flak, negative publicity of the media house, across borders created an atmosphere of hatred, forgetting that wars will end and the leaders will go back to their lives, while the general public who stood with their nation will be left asking for justice, systematic corruption and poverty; which have always been the pressing issues in both countries. Who was right or wrong during the conflict is irrelevant here because people were willing to believe whatever their leaders told them.
Pakistani media showed a good grip on media ethics during the conflict compared to India. However, the conflict shows that Pakistan’s decision-makers always knew the power of social media voices, and as a citizen, I feel that Pakistani policymakers have finally acknowledged that their ban on X was intended to silence the public and that this was all a part of the government’s controlling rhetoric. This raises questions about what will happen now that the war is over and the enemy is no longer external.
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