The Press Release: How CJP Will (And Won't) Talk About Itself

Press release. This article is itself a press release. We are publishing it under the [truth] section to demonstrate the point it makes: a press release is not news. It is a statement of position by an interested party. We will not publish, as news, content that arrives at the newsroom as a press release. We will publish this press release, on the record, as a press release.

The CJP newsroom's position

The Cockroach Janta Party — both the satirical party and the newsroom — is a participant in the story we are reporting on. The party will, from time to time, want to make public statements. The newsroom will, from time to time, want to report on those statements.

These are different activities. Mixing them is the central editorial failure we are committed to avoiding.

The rule

When a press release arrives at the CJP newsroom — from the party, from another political party, from a corporation, from a government ministry, from an activist group, from a PR agency — we will not publish it as a news article.

We will:

1. Read it. Press releases are useful primary sources. They tell you what an interested party wants the public to know.
2. Verify it independently. If the press release makes a factual claim, we will check the claim against a public record before publishing the claim. We will name the press release as the source of the claim, and we will link the public record we used to verify it.
3. If we cannot verify it, we do not publish it. This is non-negotiable. A press release is not a public record.
4. If we do publish a fact-checked version, we label it clearly. A "Press release: [claim], fact-checked" piece is different from a "news: [event]" piece. The reader should never have to guess.

What this means in practice

If the BJP sends us a press release claiming a specific policy outcome, we will not publish the press release. We will read it, and if there is a verifiable factual claim, we will check it against a government press release, an official order, a court filing, or a parliamentary question. If the claim holds up, we will write a fact-checked news article with the press release named as the original source of the claim, not as the article itself.

The same rule applies to the CJP party. The CJP party will issue press releases. The CJP newsroom will report on them as it would report on any other party's press release: with verification, with attribution, and with a clear separation between what was claimed (in quotes, attributed) and what the newsroom verifies (above the line, ours).

Why this matters

India's media environment in 2026 is heavily influenced by press-release journalism: a substantial fraction of what appears in mainstream news outlets is, on close reading, a re-written press release rather than independently reported news. The Press Council of India's Norms of Journalistic Conduct explicitly call this out. We will not participate in that practice.

The CJP newsroom's own press releases

When the CJP newsroom itself wants to make a public statement — about a correction, about a policy change, about a position we hold — we will publish it under the [truth] section, labelled as a press release, and we will not promote it into the front page or the breaking ticker in a way that suggests it is independently reported news.

The piece you are reading now is a press release. It is in the [truth] section. It is not breaking news. It is on the record as a statement of editorial policy.

— The Editor, CJP Newsroom