More noise than knowledge

Is journalism still about informing the public, interrogating power, and enabling democratic conversation—or has it mutated into a performance industry, driven more by noise than knowledge? This is no longer a rhetorical question but a pressing civic concern. The crisis of contemporary journalism is not incidental or technical—it is structural, moral, and intellectual. And unless we confront this crisis with honesty, the damage it is doing to our collective political life may soon become irreversible.

Across platforms—print, digital, television, and even emerging ‘independent’ spaces—the degeneration of journalism is visible. What we witness today is a profession that has steadily moved away from its fundamental commitments: the commitment to evidence over conjecture, to fieldwork over desk analysis, to public reasoning over private spectacle. It increasingly serves the market, not the people. The journalist now often performs not as a reporter but as a brand ambassador, a crisis actor, or worse, a partisan soldier.

How did we arrive here? Much of it has to do with the collapse of editorial independence under the weight of corporate ownership, political patronage, and the attention economy. Journalism, which once claimed the right to speak truth to power, has in many places become a vehicle for reinforcing the status quo. Who owns the media? Who funds the ‘editorial choices’? Who decides what makes news and what does not? These questions are no longer marginal—they are central to understanding the deep malaise that afflicts the profession.

We must also ask: what is journalism producing today? Too often, it is not analysis but accusation, not investigation but insinuation, not reporting but repackaging. Complex realities are flattened into binaries. Protest is dismissed as disruption. Dissent is caricatured as threat. The newsroom has in many cases become an amplifier of state discourse or elite consensus, rather than a site of independent judgment. How can such journalism claim to defend the public interest?

Moreover, the very texture of journalistic work has changed. There is little time, funding, or incentive for rigorous field reporting. Speed trumps accuracy. Sound bites replace substance. Editorial line is shaped less by facts and more by ideological convenience or audience analytics. In this climate, critical inquiry becomes impossible. What room is left for the slow, patient, and often uncomfortable labour of truth-making?

A related problem is the blurring of boundaries between opinion and news. When every reporter becomes a commentator, when every headline is designed to provoke rather than inform, and when every platform rewards performative outrage, the space for reasoned civic discourse narrows. The journalist, once imagined as a disciplined professional, is increasingly indistinguishable from the influencer, the ideologue, or the entertainer.

This degeneration is not just professional—it is political. Journalism does not exist in a vacuum. When journalism fails, democracy suffers. When facts are manipulated, when debate is trivialised, when citizens are emotionally incited rather than intellectually equipped, democratic culture collapses into cynicism and distrust. Who benefits from such erosion? Certainly not the public.

But we must also resist romanticizing a golden age of journalism that perhaps never fully existed. The profession has always had contradictions—between power and independence, between objectivity and engagement. Yet today, those contradictions have hardened into crisis. The question now is whether journalism is capable of any internal reckoning. Can it reimagine its vocation? Can it recover its moral seriousness?

If journalism is to matter again, it must disinvest from spectacle and reinvest in substance. It must prioritize fieldwork, build trust from below, and treat the public not as an audience to entertain but as a democratic community to serve. It must ask difficult questions, not just of others, but of itself. What is the role of the journalist in an age of digital manipulation and institutional decay? What does it mean to be credible, rigorous, and accountable today?

This is a moment of reckoning—not only for journalism as a profession but for journalism as a public ethic. If the crisis remains unaddressed, journalism may well survive as an industry, but not as a civic institution. And that would be a loss far greater than most are willing to admit.

Zahid Sultan, Freelance Researcher, has a PhD in Politics and Governance from Central University of Kashmir.