Opinion How Indian media stood out in Ukraine war coverage

Western coverage of the Ukraine War constituted an unprecedentedly forced attempt at what Edward S Herman and Chomsky described as “manufacturing consent”. Often, this included falsehoods. Emanating from unnamed sources, stories were amplified and repeated by the mainstream media, only to be later revealed as untrue. From the comical, like the “ghost of Kiev”; to the infantile, like the media making martyrs of the Ukrainian Snake Island soldiers, who turned out to have surrendered alive; to the serious, like claiming a Russian missile had struck Polish soil, when it turned out to be a Ukrainian missile; to the consequential, like ignoring the story, now admitted, that one month into the war Ukraine and Russia had agreed to a peace deal where Moscow withdrew in exchange for neutrality, but which Kyiv rejected at the behest of President Biden. All this contributed to the repetition of the moral certitude that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was without historical precedent in its barbarity. This was despite early statistics revealing that Israel’s Gaza operation resulted in more civilian deaths in weeks than Russia’s did in 18 months, and twice as many women and children.

Any attempt to question the dominant narrative in real time resulted in complete expulsion from the public realm as a “Putin puppet” etc — a McCarthyite storm of censorious hysteria that dwarfed the worst excesses of the 1950s. While in the 1960s, the Pentagon Papers revelations were published by The New York Times, exposing the reality of the Vietnam War, such real-time opposition in the mainstream media to government foreign policy became unthinkable in the last three years. Russian TV channel RT – along with its Chinese counterpart CGTN — was banned in some Western countries and its social media scrubbed. Individual broadcasters, the most prominent being Tucker Carlson, were cancelled from mainstream media.

Despite this, by November 2024, over half of Americans opposed continued military aid to Ukraine. In the same month, they elected a President who promised to end the war. In an election where Ukraine provided the sharpest foreign policy distinction between the candidates, Trump became only the second Republican to win a popular majority since 1988.

The chasm between the Western media and its Western audiences was matched by that between the Western media and its foreign audiences. This was particularly so in the Global South, with broadcast after broadcast seeming to convey that Ukrainian lives mattered more than “brown lives”. Apologies were issued only when this message was blurted out overtly, for example, after CBS’s senior correspondent said Ukraine isn’t like Iraq or Afghanistan because it’s civilised and European. An enormous untapped global market emerged, one that had already begun turning off mainstream channels and tuning into the internet for news and commentary.

And soon, clips started to appear in WhatsApp groups throughout Western countries of Indian talk show hosts critiquing Americans and Europeans over Ukraine. Arnab Goswami’s evisceration of an American panellist went so viral it returned months later with Chinese subtitles. Palki Sharma’s WION reports, criticising both sides in the conflict, shot her to global fame.

Indian media’s approach to the Russia-Ukraine conflict delivered precisely what global audiences had been craving. Mostly, the coverage provided alternatives to the mono-opinion espoused by BBC, CNN, Fox, The New York Times, The Times, The Guardian etc. This included platforming world-renowned experts, largely ignored by Western media, like professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. The Indian government’s neutral position, reflected amongst the Indian public and elites, may have provided breathing space for Indian broadcasters and panellists — unlike their Western counterparts. No opinion-maker in India had their career imperilled for discussing the Ukraine War in one way or another.

Secondly, particularly around six months to a year into the conflict, the Indian media helped quench the global public’s desire for truth. While at the beginning, much of India’s reportage reflexively repeated stories from Reuters or AP, it later took a more critical approach, diverging from the Western echo chamber. And even though the debunking of the aforementioned falsehoods was usually ignored or received soft or minor coverage in the West, Indian media showed no such restraint. It also offered more realistic outlooks on the likely end to the war, rather than simply repeating expectations of a Ukrainian victory.

Thirdly, Western media’s suppression of any information that portrayed Ukraine in even the most mildly negative light offered Indian reporters near exclusive opportunities to cover an entire half of the story of the War. This included reporting its textbook geostrategic causes, such as the 2014 overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian Government, corruption in the Zelenskyy, lack of democracy, alleged Nazi elements, battlefield failures etc.

Lastly, the Indian media broadcast all the significant speeches made by Russian officials. Their Western counterparts, in contrast, showed only those Russian statements which suited the narrative of Putin choosing to invade Ukraine on an imperialist whim, absent of any historical context. As Chomsky put it “If the Russians make an offer for a negotiation, you can’t find it. That’s suppressed. You’re not allowed to know what they are saying.”

These were the same factors that led to alternative media being catapulted into the limelight. The biggest alternative media figures are all those who defied Western narratives on Ukraine, from Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and Russell Brand, to Jimmy Dore and George Galloway. Indian media enjoy an advantage over them, however, being able to harness the traditional channels of TV and print.

As the global order undergoes seismic shifts, a key factor will be soft power. The Ukraine war has been mirrored by an unprecedented propaganda war prosecuted by Western and Russian outlets. As a state, India, which has stayed resolutely neutral, has benefited significantly from cheap Russian energy while buttressing its reputation as a leader amongst the Global South. Similarly, Indian media was able to “come through the middle”, harnessing the chasm between Western and Russian narratives. Through merely maintaining basic journalistic standards at a time when legacy Western behemoths had abandoned them, India’s media elevated itself to being a top-tier player. In doing so, it not only advanced Delhi’s soft power but has potentially altered the world media landscape forever.

Pethiyagoda is a Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the book Indian Foreign Policy and Cultural Values