Your podcast discovery platform
Curious minds select the most fascinating podcasts from around the world. Discover hand-piqd audio recommendations on your favorite topics.
piqer for: Climate and Environment Globalization and politics
Raksha Kumar is a multimedia journalist focusing on human rights, politics and social injustices. Since 2011, she has reported for The New York Times, BBC, Guardian, TIME, South China Morning Post, Foreign Policy, Scroll.in and The Hindu.
In March 2018, she was awarded the National Foundation for India Media Award for her reportage on land rights in India. In 2017, she was shortlisted for Kurt Schork Memorial Awards in International Journalism. For her work on land conflicts in India, she was awarded the Chameli Devi Award for Outstanding Media Personality in 2016.
As a reporter, her focus areas are land and forest rights of the most vulnerable communities. However, since these issues cannot be looked at in isolation, Raksha found herself increasingly reporting on armed conflict around resource extraction in places like Chhattisgarh and Kashmir.
In 2015, she wrote, shot and directed a documentary film on Rationalists in Contemporary India. It was aired by India's public broadcaster, Doordarshan. The film has been screened in 29 locations across the country until now.
The same year, Raksha was selected as a Chevening Fellow by the University of Westminster to research on Hindu Right in the UK. This helped Raksha build on her post graduate dissertation which was on Hindu Fundamentalists in India.
With a Fulbright Scholarship for Leadership Development, she went to the Columbia University in New York City to pursue a Masters in Science. As a student, she was offered the Scripps Howard Fellowship to report from Israel and the West Bank. Since 2011, Raksha has reported from 11 countries across the world.
Raksha worked as an editor at NDTV, leading English news channel in India. She was the editorial head of a two-hour prime time news show, where she lead a team of about 20 junior journalists.
A graduate of Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi, Raksha was a dedicated student and a passionate public speaker.
Video: How To Successfully Bribe The Media
www.cobrapost.com is an investigative journalism website that released a documentary made with hidden cameras. The film is titled ‘Operation 136’ because India is ranked 136th in the world press freedom index.
The journalists posed as political operatives and approached more than 27 media houses. They then offered to pay billions of dollars in return for favourable coverage of the ruling party in the run-up to the 2019 general elections in India.
The media houses were asked to further a Hindu fundamentalist agenda that would favour the party in power, BJP, and also asked to show opposition leaders in a bad light.
Without putting up much resistance, many media owners accepted the offer.
The full documentary (in Hindi) is available on YouTube. The second half of the documentary was made public on May 25.
"Only two of them stood out for categorically refusing to entertain the undercover reporter proposing ‘Hindutva’ tilted news on behalf of a made-up entity, Srimad Bhagvad Gita Prachar Samiti," says another story in The Wire, an independent website.
