Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the withdrawal of the legal actions that many Indian media outlets have brought against Cobrapost, an investigative news website whose undercover reporting has shown that most of India’s leading media groups would take money from the ruling party in return for favourable coverage. RSF also urges all of these media groups to respect their staff’s editorial independence.
Cobrapost named its undercover investigation Operation 136 in reference to India’s ranking in RSF's 2017 World Press Freedom Index. And what it found could explain why this country, the cradle of an exceptionally dynamic press, has fallen so low.
Cobrapost posted an initial series of videos in March and a second series, “Part II,” on 25 May. They show Cobrapost reporter Pushp Sharma posing as a right-wing Hindu nationalist activist meeting the owners of 27 leading media groups while carrying a hidden camera.
He offered each of them significant sums of money – to be paid in cash if necessary – in return for favourable coverage of the activities of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the run-up to the 2019 general election. Almost all of these media bosses accepted the offer and most of them promised to set up special teams for this purpose.
After the latest series of Operation 136 videos were released, three of the targeted media groups sent legal notices to Cobrapost and to other independent media outlets, such as The Wire and The Quint, that published stories about the Cobrapost sting on their own websites.
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