India does not suffer from a lack of crises. It suffers from a lack of accountability that follows them. Fires, crashes, poisonings, safety failures and environmental disasters unfold with alarming regularity. Each incident briefly dominates headlines, provokes outrage and is then quietly archived as “news happened.” The deeper failures that caused these tragedies remain largely unexamined. This is where the media stands at a crossroads—either as a chronicler of incidents or as a biting watchdog that forces systemic correction.

Consider the Goa restaurant fire that killed several people. The immediate narrative focused on the tragedy, the grieving families and the arrest of the restaurant owners. What received far less scrutiny was the ecosystem that allowed such an establishment to operate in blatant violation of safety norms. Restaurants do not flout fire, licensing and occupancy rules in isolation. They survive through a web of compromised inspections, selective enforcement and routine bribery involving local officials, police and political intermediaries. Yet, in most such cases, the owners alone are made the accused. The officials who enabled the violations rarely face criminal accountability. By not insisting that corrupt public officials be tried as co-accused, the media allows the real message to go out loud and clear: violations are manageable if the right palms are greased.

The IndiGo aviation crisis exposed a different but equally dangerous failure. Mass flight disruptions, stranded passengers and spiralling fares were treated largely as an operational meltdown. What remained under-examined was the deeper policy failure—a near-duopoly in Indian skies, weak regulatory oversight by the DGCA and an aviation policy that prioritises growth metrics over passenger protection. The uncomfortable questions—about regulator–operator proximity, lax enforcement and policy ambiguity—were asked briefly, then abandoned. Without sustained scrutiny, aviation safety and consumer rights remain hostage to institutional inertia.

The cough syrup tragedy, where contaminated medicines manufactured in India were linked to deaths abroad and in the counyry, exposed a far more disturbing failure. This was not merely about one company or one batch. It pointed to a broken drug regulatory system, weak inspections and a pharmaceutical ecosystem where profit often outruns ethics. The same ecosystem thrives domestically through fake medicines, diluted drugs and questionable doctor–pharma relationships. Media coverage highlighted the international embarrassment and official statements but stopped short of interrogating how diluted drug policy and compromised enforcement have allowed such practices to flourish for years.

Each of these incidents revealed a specific failure: corruption in local governance, regulatory capture in aviation and systemic rot in drug oversight. But the media treated them as isolated events rather than symptoms of institutional decay. The dots were never joined. Accountability was never escalated. Policy reform was never pursued with persistence.

The pattern repeats across pollution, water crises, road safety and public health. Delhi’s smog dominates headlines every winter, yet long-term enforcement failures are rarely tracked. Water shortages trigger outrage in summer, then vanish from debate once tankers roll in. Road accidents shock for a day, compensation is announced and the structural causes—unsafe design, poor enforcement, regulatory overlap—remain untouched.

Why does this happen? Part of the answer lies in newsroom economics. Sustained investigations are expensive, legally risky and politically inconvenient. Episodic reporting is cheaper and safer. Another reason is access journalism. Questioning systems too hard risks losing access to power. Over time, caution becomes habit.

But the cost of this retreat is visible. Public trust in media is eroding. Audiences no longer see journalism as an ally in their struggle for safety, health and fairness. They see it as a mirror of outrage cycles, not a force for correction.

The media’s constitutional role was never to merely report what happened. It was to ask why it happened, who enabled it and what must change so it does not happen again. When media limits itself to chronicling tragedies, it abdicates its watchdog role. And when watchdogs stop biting, power stops listening.

The question before Indian media is no longer abstract. It is existential. Does it want to survive as a credible public institution or merely as a content distributor competing for attention? Survival will not come from louder debates or faster breaking news. It will come from moral clarity, persistence and the courage to demand accountability beyond the obvious culprits.

If media does not reclaim that role, the public will look elsewhere. And once trust is lost, it rarely returns easily.

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