JET: The Test Kashmir’s Newsrooms Cannot Afford to Fail

sameer
Comments 0
04 Mar 2026

There is a quiet crisis living inside Kashmir’s press cards and it has been living there for decades. When the government introduced the Teachers Eligibility Test, the logic was simple and unarguable: before you shape young minds, prove you have one. The same logic, applied to journalism, becomes revolutionary and necessary. Kashmir’s media landscape carries a wound that no press release will heal. For years, obtaining a newspaper declaration from the District Magistrate was less an act of journalistic ambition and more a transaction, a certificate to trade multiply, and sell at inflated prices. Multiple registrations, zero editions. Multiple mastheads, zero reporting. The press card became a tool of access, of leverage, of quiet intimidation. Ask some of these license/declaration holders to write a formal application. Ask them to construct a paragraph with a subject, a verb, and a coherent thought. The silence that follows would be its own editorial. Yellow journalism did not flourish here because corruption was hidden. It flourished because corruption needed a partner and found one in unaccountable, unqualified, unexamined newsrooms happy to trade silence for favours and headlines for settlements. A Journalism Eligibility Test would not end bad journalism overnight. But it would end the comfortable pretence that anyone holding a press card is automatically a journalist. Accountability begins with a test. Kashmir’s readers deserve nothing less.