TELEVISION SETS ACROSS INDIA — On the night of May 8–9, 2025, Indian news television reached a milestone that previous generations of journalists could not have imagined: it began to resemble an animated video game. Not metaphorically. Literally. Channels featured air raid sirens buzzing in the background, CGI helicopters flying across the chyron, wall-mounted maps of Pakistan marked with glowing red target points, and news anchors in suits delivering breaking news updates at the volume and pace of a man who has consumed three Red Bulls and genuinely believes the fate of the nation depends on how loudly he says the word "missile."

The Reuters Institute, which monitors journalism globally, noted that Indian channels during this period "looked like an animated video game" for the full three-day period of active hostilities. Alt News co-founder Pratik Sinha described the atmosphere more directly: anchors were behaving like WhatsApp forwards armed with professional studios. The studios had green screens. The green screens had maps. The maps had targets. The targets were, in several documented cases, entirely fictional cities that Pakistani missiles had allegedly struck — except the missiles had not struck them, the cities were fine, and the footage being shown was either old, unrelated, or from a different country's conflict entirely.

One anchor reported that Pakistan's General Asim Munir had been arrested in a coup. He had not been arrested. There was no coup. The general is fine. He was, at the time of the broadcast, presumably watching the same Indian news channel and processing the information that he had just been arrested, which he had not been. Both the anchor and the general have continued their careers. Only one of them is a general. Both of them are on television regularly.