On the same day of India’s strikes on Balakot, NDTV anchor Nidhi Razdan tweeted: “Can we all just calm down. An escalation does not help either country. To begin with, stop watching TV and seeing Twitter on both sides. We will all be saner.”

Legacy media in India made a fool of themselves reporting this major story. D’Souza and Razdan were the only journalists brave enough to acknowledge this; theirs was remarkable behaviour in the context of the Indian press fraternity, which is largely impervious to introspection and apology.

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In the hours after the February 26 air strike, established print publications and television channels reported that 200 to 300 terrorists had been killed in the attack, and that the largest training camp of the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohamed (JeM) had been hit. The news outlets attributed these statements to “sources”, even though the government had not officially signed off on these claims.

By the next day, Reuters had reported on the ground from Balakot that the attack wounded one man, damaged one house, formed four craters and felled some trees. On February 28, Al Jazeera confirmed Reuters’ details, and added that the person wounded had been struck on his forehead by shrapnel.

Reporters were not allowed to visit the site of the so-called training camp, but journalists from both organisations checked with local hospitals nearby who said they had received no dead bodies. The reports also quoted local residents and diplomats posted around the area as saying the training camp had not existed for some years, the site housed a madrassa (school) with some affiliation to the JeM.

An update from Reuters, also on February 28, carried word of a fatality: a crow had died.

On March 3, S.S. Ahluwalia – an MP from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – put up a Facebook video in which he said there were no human casualties in the attack, adding that the point of the air strike was not to have human casualties but to demonstrate to Pakistan that India has the capability to hit them inside their territory despite their surveillance and security.

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Why, then, did the media roll out the figure of up to 300 killed, and attribute it to “sources”? The question is even more relevant because something similar happened in September 2016.

At the time, the Indian government had carried out what they called a “surgical strike” in Pakistan in retaliation for a terrorist attack in Uri that killed 19 Indian soldiers. The Indian media then reported that the “surgical strike” resulted in 35 to 80 casualties. A BBC ground report mentioned that two Pakistani soldiers had been killed, and an Economist report said no Pakistani soldiers were killed but there were about a dozen dead on their side, far fewer than the casualties mentioned in the Indian press.

“In any military conflict, there is great uncertainty about what has happened – the “fog of war”. The very fact that the government did not claim any numbers in official briefings, including the first one, should have given [the Indian media] pause,” said Srinath Raghavan, professor of international relations and history at Ashoka University. “But concerns about being left standing alone when everyone else [in the media] was making a headlong dash may have triggered a race to the bottom.”

The Indian media also appears to have a crush on the armed forces. This may be especially evident under the right-wing government led by the BJP – such governments are typically strong on national security – but it has been palpable even under past governments. The Indian media has long been reluctant to criticise the armed forces, even when reports of serious human rights violations have emerged.

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On July 15, 2004, 12 women in the state of Manipur took off their clothes in public and raised a banner with the words “Indian Army Rape Us” to protest the rape and murder of a young woman called Thangjam Manorama by the Assam Rifles military unit.

In the Human Rights Watch report on Manorama’s death, the only mainstream news publication referenced is the Press Trust of India agency, which carried no mention of her rape and only fleeting mentions of her “alleged” killing. No major newspapers were referenced, an illustration of how the story was mostly ignored by the media.

In the book Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?, five women recount the events and aftermath of two nights in February 1991 when more than 50 women were raped by an army unit in Kashmir. The book notes the role of the Press Council of India, which carried out a probe on behalf of the army and dismissed the local medical officer’s account of treating vaginal lacerations, injuries, multiple abrasions over thighs, buttocks and chests as “worthless”.

In recent years, the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora have become names that come up in television news discussions, but are rarely (if ever) the topic of debate – although rape and sexual violence have been a significant topic of public conversation.

Then there is the nature of reporting in heavily militarised zones such as Kashmir and several states in India’s northeast, and in war and conflict zones. Access to these spaces is controlled by the armed forces, creating a dependency on the army, a need to maintain goodwill.

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When permission is granted, the army also provides or facilitates travel, living and logistical arrangements for reporters. It is also not irrelevant to point out that several influential television journalists are from armed forces families.

“Indian news organisations recruit children of privilege. You have children of senior bureaucrats and politicians and high-level defence forces officers reporting on government and the army and politics. When you are close to power, related to it, it is even more difficult to be critical of it,” said Suchitra Vijayan, executive director at The Polis Project, a New York-based hybrid organisation that bridges research and reportage.

“As it is in India, we are not taught to be critical of authority. This hiring of privilege creates a situation where even journalism 101 is not followed.”