A year in news reports: Nidhi Suresh and Basant Kumar on Newslaundry’s biggest stories of 2021
In a year marked by protests and the pandemic, two Newslaundry correspondents – Nidhi Suresh and Basant Kumar – navigate our biggest stories of 2021, and what they learned in the process. 2021 picked up where 2020 left off: with the farmer protests leading up to January’s violence at Red Fort. “It was also during the farmer protests that we realised the importance of the media beat,” says Nidhi. “The media became a part of the protest; the anger against the media had become so obvious.” They discuss the subsequent arrest of farmers in February, and the assembly election coverage through the NL Sena project in March. April brought the second wave of the pandemic. Basant talks about the series of ground reports he did with Ayush from Uttar Pradesh, the emotional turmoil of reporting from the ground during that time, and the establishment’s apathy towards the crisis. “When the UP government makes a claim that nobody died of an oxygen shortage,” he says, “our stories stand as a test