Newslaundry Podcast

In this week’s episode, host Abhinandan Sekhri is joined by Anand Vardhan, Washington Post's India correspondent Niha Masih, and Sneha Koshy, the head of NDTV's Kerala bureau. The podcast starts with the panel’s take on BBC’s report on Kashmir, which was rumoured to be untrue. Niha was in Kashmir for five days and she talks about the communication shutdown there, also describing how restrictions on movement for the media was different on each day. Abhinandan asks: “Why does a Washington Post correspondent get a curfew pass [while] a HT bureau chief who has been working for three decades in Kashmir is denied one?” Niha responds, “It was not my pass, but I was travelling with someone who had a curfew pass. But a lot of people said that the local Kashmiri journalists found it harder to get curfew passes, but the ones from Delhi found it easier.” Abhinandan expresses how he felt about the sound of bullet firings in the BBC video. Anand points out: “It could be a deliberate message to suppress information and the