As media organisations across the world toil to cover what’s happening on the ground in Afghanistan, TV9 Bharatvarsh is busy airing fantasy reinterpretations of the 2001 Battle of Tora Bora. In the Indian TV news channel’s retelling, the supposed villain of the piece isn’t Osama Bin Laden hiding in a cave but Mahamanav, a giant from the Vedic age.

The ancient monster, depending on when you happen to catch TV9 Bharatvarsh, can look anything from the mythical Yeti to a sci-fi alien, or simply an early avatar of homo sapiens. Seemingly, the villain can as easily be replaced by an airplane from the Mahabharat age, that is about 5,000 years ago, if you were wondering.

In this TV9 fantasy, eight American soldiers entered a Kandahar cave 20 years ago – or 19, they aren’t really sure – searching for Osama and his Al Qaeda comrades. The soldiers never came out. Because, TV9 tells us, they were either devoured by the monster or – again they aren’t sure – disappeared into a “time well” which cloaks a plane from the Mahabharat era.

If you can bring yourself to sit all the way through one of the TV channel’s “reports”, you might catch the narrator mentioning that their fantasy may just be, well, a fantasy. It’s merely something they found floating in that great treasure of scholarship called social media and the channel’s editors seemingly went, ‘Wow! Will this make for a fine piece of journalism or what?! Let’s go broadcast it to the world. Quickly now!!!’

The TV9 folks probably don’t know it but their fantasy is not even original. It originated in the West, in that ancient era of 2016 when it was a giant Biblical creature doing battle with US soldiers in Kandahar. Ever the copycats, Indian “news” outlets quickly picked up the “story” and have been running with it ever since, taking care, of course, to swap Christian beasts with Hindu ones.

Wondering why purported news outlets routinely run such garbage? Easy. It gets them eyeballs, or so they believe, which means more ads, more money. This is why Newslaundry won’t take ad money, from governments or corporations. This is why we must always implore you to pay to keep news free. So, subscribe now to keep news free from big bad monsters, ancient and new.