Jitesh Dammani

Media Literacy Writer at The Balanced News

Jitesh Dammani is a media literacy advocate at The Balanced News. He writes practical guides on spotting fake news, understanding media ownership, and navigating filter bubbles in Indian media. Jitesh focuses on the reader-side of TBN's mission: turning the technical machinery of bias detection, sentiment scoring, and Lens Score into clear, useful guidance that any reader can apply to their everyday news consumption. He covers the most common vectors of misleading or low-quality information in the Indian context — forwarded WhatsApp claims, regional-language viral videos, decontextualised clips, and the AI-generated synthetic content that increasingly circulates ahead of elections and during high-emotion news cycles — and writes verification walkthroughs that prioritise checks readers can actually do themselves. Within TBN's editorial workflow, Jitesh is the named reviewer for health and media-meta coverage, beats where reader harm from misinformation is most direct. He examines the AI analysis for clarity (is the framing actually understandable?) and accuracy (does the bias breakdown match what a reader would see if they read the underlying sources?). He also maintains TBN's library of media literacy explainers, including ownership maps of major Indian outlets, the legal and political relationships that influence editorial positions, and the recurring narrative patterns — false-balance, manufactured outrage, both-sides-ism on settled facts — that recur across the Indian news ecosystem. Jitesh's long-form pieces aim to make TBN's analytical output usable: readers should leave each story knowing not just which way coverage leaned but why, and what they would have noticed if they had read the originals.