The press is the lens through which Americans know the world, South Asia included. To understand the picture, you have to understand the lens: who owns it, what pressures it faces, and where it distorts.
Media matters
The internet and social media are the fuzzy lenses through which most people now get news and information. That is not enough. To get a good grasp of the world, readers need news and opinion from professional journalism organizations that employ trained reporters, fact-checkers and editors who gather, verify and curate the news, day after day. There is no substitute for that process.
That is what publications such as The New York Times, The Hindu, The Wall Street Journal, Dawn, CNN, the Financial Times, The Washington Post and the BBC do, and this site relies on them. Even well-run newsrooms now depend on a fickle base of subscribers and advertisers, and they deserve loyal support. The site links to their work rather than reproducing it.
Reading the region
American media generally cover South Asia regularly and diligently. But a fast-changing region of five very different countries competes for scarce resources with every other region and topic, so no single publication is enough. Readers need several sources, read critically, supplemented by the region’s own English-language press.
Press freedom varies widely across the five countries. In several of them journalists face harassment, arrest or broadcast bans. Meanwhile journalism everywhere is in upheaval, producing distortions that range from inadvertent bias to insufficient nuance to deliberate fake news.
Editor’s analysis · Sep 25, 2026
Freedom of the press and the White House ban: separating the arguments
A list discussion asked why journalism organizations that defend press freedom should speak up when the White House bars particular outlets. This piece sorts the competing arguments.
“Freedom of the press” often serves as a catch-all phrase that lumps distinct issues together. The dispute over the White House ban involves five separate questions, each with a different legal or ethical footing: whether the press has a right to be at the White House at all; whether credentials can be revoked abruptly; whether outlets can be excluded because of their coverage; whether networks may decline to air a president's speech; and whether that choice was fair. A sixth concerns the journalism organizations that rallied to the outlets' defense.
Coverage Watch
A recurring note on how American outlets cover India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal: what gets covered, what gets missed, and which framings persist.
Then and now: from neglect to negativity
First written June 2023 · Updated October 2026
A generation ago, the complaint about American coverage of the subcontinent was neglect. Stories were rare, reporters were flown in for one-off disasters, and the region appeared mostly through famines, floods and “dowry deaths.” That complaint has largely been answered. Major U.S. outlets now keep correspondents in South Asia and cover its politics, business, culture and history.
The problems today are different. The first is the economics of attention. Online, bad news pays: a study of 105,000 headline variations found that each negative word raised clicks, while positive words lowered them. The second is speed. Social media now delivers events live, and in 2025, for the first time, more Americans got news from social and video platforms (54 percent) than from television (50 percent). Legacy outlets have raced to compete with short videos and instant updates, too often at the expense of the analysis that once set them apart.
The third is access. Over the past decade, pressure on journalists across the subcontinent has shifted from episodic to systematic: permits withheld, visas not renewed, tax raids, and cases filed under sedition and “digital security” laws. In 2024 three foreign correspondents left India after their permits or visas were withdrawn or not renewed. In this year's World Press Freedom Index, India ranks 157th of 180 countries, Pakistan 153rd and Bangladesh 152nd. For most of the 2000s, India ranked between 105th and 131st.
The result is coverage that gravitates to inequality, sectarian conflict, authoritarian drift and disaster. These are real stories, but the slow, cumulative gains get far less attention. By the World Bank's measure, the share of Indians in extreme poverty fell from 16.2 percent in 2011–12 to 2.3 percent in 2022–23, lifting 171 million people up. That is among the largest stories of the century, and it is rarely told.
Sources: Robertson et al., Nature Human Behaviour (2023); Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025; Reporters Without Borders, World Press Freedom Index 2026; World Bank.
Editor's essay · October 12, 2026
The expensive journalism degree no longer pays
A costly degree, a shrinking job market and pay that cannot carry the debt: why aspiring journalists should invest in skills rather than credentials.
The economics no longer work
Over the 30 years to 2025–26, published tuition after inflation roughly doubled at public four-year colleges and rose 74 percent at private ones, while median family income rose 39 percent (College Board). Graduate journalism is the extreme case. Columbia's one-year master's degree now carries an estimated all-in cost of $124,599: $81,500 in tuition, $10,354 in fees and $32,745 in living expenses (Columbia Journalism School). That excludes a year of forgone earnings.
Federal data analyzed by the Wall Street Journal show the result. Graduates of Northwestern's master's program who borrowed owed a median of $54,900, and two years out earned less than $42,000 (MediaPost). At 8 percent over ten years, that debt costs about $670 a month, nearly a fifth of gross pay before rent in New York or Washington. Across all experience levels, the median U.S. reporter earns $60,280 (BLS); starting pay typically runs $35,000 to $45,000 (JournalismJobs).
Borrowing is about to get harder. The 2025 federal budget law eliminates Grad PLUS loans and caps graduate borrowing from July 2026 (College Board). Students who cannot pay their own way will turn to private loans at higher rates. The same law creates Workforce Pell Grants for short, career-focused programs, a federal signal pointing the same way as this essay.
The jobs are shrinking
U.S. newsroom employment fell 26 percent between 2008 and 2020, and newspaper newsrooms lost more than half their jobs, from about 71,000 to 31,000 (Pew Research Center). The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a further 4 percent decline in reporter jobs by 2034 (BLS). Meanwhile the paid demand for journalistic skills has moved elsewhere: public relations specialists now outnumber reporters several times over (BuzzStream).
Many who do land newsroom jobs want out. In a 2025 survey, half of journalists had considered quitting in the past year (Muck Rack); among local journalists, 72 percent had thought about leaving (CISLM).
Even the schools concede the point
CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism is building an endowment to make tuition free, and this fall 70 percent of its incoming class attends tuition-free (Newmark J-School). Columbia now runs a loan-repayment program that pays up to $10,000 a year toward the loans of graduates working in local newsrooms (Columbia Journalism School). Both are admirable. But a top school paying off its own graduates' loans is an admission that the debt is more than newsroom pay can carry. Neither program creates jobs or raises salaries.
Invest in skills, not credentials
Degrees still have value: internships, networks, and the bachelor's credential some employers screen for. The case here is narrower. An expensive degree, especially a graduate one, is the least efficient way into a shrinking field. The better investment is in specific, demonstrable skills that set a journalist apart and carry over to adjacent careers if newsroom jobs do not materialize: statistics and data analysis, economics and public finance, media ethics and law, and AI tools for research and verification. Such training is affordable. A week-long data journalism bootcamp run by Investigative Reporters and Editors costs $850 for journalists from smaller outlets (IRE). Organizations that support young journalists, and the donors behind them, would get far more from funding many such courses than from subsidizing a few six-figure degrees.
Journalism has always drawn young idealists. Their zeal should be encouraged, and it can be, without breaking the bank.
— John Laxmi
The profession in numbers
Why the old path into journalism is narrowing. Refreshed when new data appear.
Newsroom jobs, 2008 and 2020
Employees in U.S. newsrooms
All newsrooms
Newspapers
Digital-native outlets
Source: Pew Research Center, 2021. Latest year published.
College costs have outrun incomes
Increase after inflation, 1995–96 to 2025–26
Debt versus pay, journalism master's graduates
Median federal debt and median earnings two years after graduation
Columbia
Northwestern
Missouri
Graduates who borrowed; earnings for 2015–16 graduates, the latest analyzed. Source: Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data, via MediaPost.
Looking for a job in journalism?
The site does not host job listings. These sites, run by organizations that specialize in them, are good places to start:
- SAJA Job Board
South Asian Journalists Association - AAJA Career Center
Asian American Journalists Association - Muck Rack
Directory of journalists and their recent work
Editor's comments
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How The Times covers ‘60 Minutes’ and other journalists
Editor's comment
The New York Times · How The Times covers ‘60 Minutes’ and other journalists
The American news media is turning into a Hollywood-style industry, full of internecine intrigue, gossip, politics and conspiracy. As reporters themselves become the subject of stories, journalists risk becoming more performative and less focused on their profession. Not a good thing.
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Ex-finance secretary questions India’s GDP calculation; NDTV anchor insists on the data’s ‘sanctity’
Editor's comment
Newslaundry · Ex-finance secretary questions India's GDP calculation; NDTV anchor insists on the data's ‘sanctity’
When Reuters reported that India's economy grew 7.8 percent in the April–June quarter, one reader complained that the Western press always paints India negatively. The serious challenge to the figure came instead from an Indian: Subhash Chandra Garg, a former Finance Secretary and World Bank executive director, who argued on NDTV that the number may mask weaknesses, including a fall in consumption.
The interview showed the interviewer's own bias in favor of the government. NDTV's executive editor did not want to hear Garg's criticism and accused him of undermining the “sanctity” of official statistics.
What is the real growth rate? It is hard to say. Revisions to the statistics sharply reduced the previous year's GDP, from ₹86 lakh crore to ₹80 lakh crore by Garg's account, so the growth rate looks impressive partly because the base was lowered. The government has not adequately explained the revision.
Why this section
Most Americans never visit South Asia. What they know arrives through a handful of newsrooms, and those newsrooms are under pressure from owners, governments, shrinking budgets and falling trust. Those pressures shape the picture as much as the events do.
