Watching The Watchdogs: No One Killed Jessica & Journalism On Screen

On January 7, as No One Killed Jessica (2011) marked fifteen years of its afterlife in public memory, the film invited a re-examination of what it continues to expose. From its earliest moments, even within the rhetoric of its trailer, the film articulates a nervous distinction between reportage and justice. The media, as a journalist within the film claims, “exists to circulate information, not to arbitrate truth or justice.” However, Meera, the unyielding journalist played by Rani Mukerji, voices the ethical impasse at the film’s core when she admits that injustice may be endurable for some, but not for others. Journalism may insist on professional distance, yet the film recognises how conscience interrupts such restraint.

Viewed against the material afterlife of the case, the film’s urgency acquires sharper political edges. Manu Sharma’s subsequent ascent as an affluent liquor company owner reads as a bitter footnote, transforming the promise of accountability into a public mockery. The film remains attentive to how justice is undone quietly: through witnesses who recant, through procedural delays, through the steady interference of power and political proximity. Indian cinema has long been fascinated by journalism, though rarely convinced by it. The journalist appears repeatedly as a witness, agitator, casualty and occasionally, also as an inconvenience. Journalism, as rendered by Indian cinema, behaves as a camera turned inward—strategically examining its own methods of looking at the world it claims to reveal.

Indian cinema portrays journalism very differently from many Hollywood films, which often highlight individual heroism or stylised glamour. Films such as All the President’s Men (1976), Spotlight (2015) and The Post (2017) present journalists as decisive investigators navigating ethical dilemmas, while rom-coms often idealise them as glamorous figures darting through New York streets, coffee in hand. Nightcrawler (2014), however, moves beyond this framework, abandoning the notion of journalism as civic service and instead, framing it as an arena of moral opportunism. The film follows a struggling man, portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal, who forces his way into crime reporting by recording violent incidents across the nightscape of Los Angeles and selling exclusive footage to news outlets. Rather than celebrating journalistic heroism, Nightcrawler exposes a media system driven by competition and spectacle, where commercial demand overrides responsibility. In such an environment, the journalist is no longer a watchdog but an active participant in manufacturing the very crises he profits from. 

Indian films, in contrast, depict journalism through the raw lens of social complexity, institutional constraints and moral ambiguity. Reporters contend with corruption, limited resources and public pressures, revealing the structural and ethical realities of their work and its consequences, rather than its surface appeal to the larger world. Across decades, films return to the newsroom to interrogate journalism’s promise and limitations oscillating between satire, spectacle and documentary realism. From the farcical idealism and absurdity of power in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983) to the rot beneath systemic failures depicted in Hansal Mehta’s Scoop (2023), many films and web series have attempted to map the evolving role of the press in a society negotiating visibility, accountability and authority. In No One Killed Jessica, repeated amplification of public anger transforms outrage into a tool of pressure—effective, even if belated. Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (2000) reimagined this cynicism for a liberalising India, where competing news channels and sensationalist trials transform journalism into entertainment. Eventually, however, Ajay (Shah Rukh Khan) & Ria (Juhi Chawla) realise their journalistic duty to keep their professional differences aside and seek justice for a victim of sexual violence.

At the same time, Talvar (2015) offered a bleak perspective on truth and a girl’s autonomy, presenting it as fractured and repackaged into competing narratives suitable for consumable prime-time entertainment. The role of journalism in this framework is to keep the wound visible rather than to heal it. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro understood media as a farce intertwined with power, for better or worse. The film does not mock journalistic intent itself, but exposes how quickly that intent collapses when confronted with entrenched corruption and institutional collusion. 

While some films highlight delayed authority, others interrogate the media’s economic logic. In Peepli [Live] (2010), rural distress and farmers’ suicides become a consumable source of entertainment only while novelty holds. Journalists are not heroes here, but operate within a system that rewards speed, outrage and emotional excess. In these films, the press intervenes only after institutional failure has calcified—police negligence, bureaucratic inertia and judicial sluggishness create the terrain for media outrage to perform its corrective function. In this vacuum, the burden of resistance shifts to those without institutional insulation. Accountability becomes possible only when spectatorship turns interrogative and when audiences demand ethical coherence from institutions designed to evade it.

Urban-focused narratives such as Page 3 (2005) on the other hand, depict a subtler erosion of integrity. This film in particular examines entertainment journalism as a site of ethical compromise. Madhavi (Konkona Sen Sharma) navigates the glamorous world of celebrities while reporting on it. The film critiques a media environment in which stories are shaped by networking, social performance and audience expectation rather than scrutiny or accountability. Similarly, Noor (2017) portrays entertainment journalism as aspirational yet hollow, propelled by affective sincerity rather than investigative rigour. Across these narratives, journalism emerges as labour under duress, with integrity surviving intermittently and institutionalised silence.

Cinema often acknowledges journalism of courage and dissent, while remaining uneasy about its ramifications. Recent works such as Hansal Mehta’s Scoop (2023), adapted from Jigna Vora’s memoir and the documentaries Writing with Fire (2021) or While We Watched (2022), foreground the vulnerability of journalists rather than their manipulative power. In Scoop, Karishma Tanna’s Jagruti becomes enmeshed in a punitive apparatus, where access collapses into presumption of guilt, revealing the fragility of ethics against state and public scrutiny. Urban, English-speaking media dominate fictional narratives, while regional and grassroots reporting emerges primarily in documentary form. 

Going against this grain, inspired by the Muzaffarpur shelter home case, Bhakshak (2024) follows Vaishali, a grassroots journalist played by Bhumi Pednekar, who runs a modest local news channel alongside Bhaskar, her cameraman (Sanjay Mishra). Their investigation into a girls’ shelter home slowly brings to the surface patterns of violence and institutional neglect that persist outside the gaze of mainstream media. By focusing on local reporting, the film frames journalism as fragile and demanding work, sustained by proximity and a difficult ethical resolve to keep looking when silence is easier. Writing with Fire too, foregrounds this imbalance and presents journalism as repetition, persistence and risk where the visibility of women reporters itself invites dangerous consequences. On similar lines, While We Watched becomes a harrowing study of journalistic courage set against the consequences of critiquing those in power. 

In No One Killed Jessica and Nagrik (2015), media coverage catalyses public mobilisation, yet journalists remain structurally unprepared for the responsibility their influence entails. In the case of Jessica Lal, news reports and televised coverage intensified public outrage over the investigation’s failures, generating pressure that ultimately compelled authorities to respond. Similarly, Nagrik shows how journalistic scrutiny can expose political corruption and bureaucratic complicity, shaping public opinion and encouraging civic engagement. Yet, both films highlight a crucial tension: journalists often lack the structures and support needed to manage the consequences of their influence. They must navigate threats, public backlash and ethical dilemmas on their own, deal with unintended consequences such as misdirected anger or vigilante action and make difficult editorial decisions under pressure with incomplete or uncertain information.

In Jolly LLB 3, the sight of a journalist perched atop a bulldozer while covering a protest is at once absurd and politically resonant. Here, the bulldozer becomes a striking symbol of sanctioned destruction, eviction and authoritarian power, with the media literally and figuratively riding atop it, highlighting both the spectacle and the disturbing complicity of journalism in amplifying state authority. Watching journalists on screen or experiencing their work in real life raises a question few narratives address directly: what does it truly mean to carry the weight of truth?

While films capture the institutional pressures and emotional toll of reporting, they also examine how journalism operates within a media economy driven by speed, spectacle and alignment with authority; how the labour of journalism isn’t exempt from its power to shape, distort and sometimes damage lives. In a politically volatile environment, news becomes a commodity and journalists often function less as watchdogs than as vendors of attention and narratives. This anxiety surfaces not only in journalism-centred films where media figures frequently appear as performative extensions of state power, but also in films outside the genre. Chak De! India (2007), for instance, depicts a media trial that dismantles Kabir Khan’s (Shah Rukh Khan) career through communal insinuation and unchecked speculation, demonstrating how reportage can precede evidence and permanently stain reputations. Cinema thus interrogates journalism’s double-edged influence: its capacity to expose injustice and its complicity in manufacturing verdicts. In doing so, films shift the question from endurance to accountability, asking not who reports but who benefits, who is harmed and who remains answerable when visibility itself becomes a weapon.