That 28-year-old journalist Pooja Tiwari wanted a drink on Sunday night wasn’t surprising. On April 1, 2016, her ‘sting operation’ on a doctor in Faridabad had been published in DNA‘s hyperlocal digital content platform, titled “I am in”. Her story claimed that the doctor was a lab technician masquerading as a general physician and illegal abortions were offered at his clinic. A week later, another doctor named in the story filed a First Information Report (FIR) with the police, accusing Tiwari of demanding Rs 2 lakh in exchange for squashing the story. Tiwari was suspended because there was an FIR against her (her story, however, remains accessible online). A month later, on Sunday night, Tiwari was having dinner with two friends when she “suddenly became angry and jumped from the balcony around 11.45pm“.

In an email that Tiwari wrote to another friend, which Indian Express has accessed, the journalist wrote that this story about the doctor had taken on a monstrous life of its own. Tiwari insisted she hadn’t taken or asked for money from anyone and that she was a victim of “character assassination”. What she does admit to is visiting the doctor with a friend, posing as the friend’s wife, and pretending to want a termination. She also wrote in the email that news of the FIR against her “spread like wildfire and many online news portals started running the news with a picture of me taken from my Facebook without my permission”.

Tiwari’s family and friends must have told her to not pay attention to all this. That’s what we tend to tell ourselves — that it doesn’t really matter. Twitter is just 140 characters that are quickly reduced to a forgettable babble. Facebook is just algorithms serving up a combination of what advertisers want and what the formulae suggest will keep you hooked. News websites are a dime a dozen, folding up and mushrooming at warp speed. It’s the virtual world. It isn’t real. We’ll never know for sure if the online rumours and comments drove Tiwari to her terrible decision, but from the way her suicide has been reported, Tiwari’s death raises a host of uncomfortable questions.

Despite the fact that Tiwari was a journalist, that she committed suicide on Sunday has been covered only by two major newspapers. DNA has nothing about her death.

The two reports that are available in mainstream media offer startlingly different perspectives upon Tiwari. The Indian Express report begins by identifying her as a journalist who “conducted a purported sting on a doctor that was published last month”, and goes on to provide a link to the story. Taking inputs from the investigating police officer, the suicide is recounted. We’re told that there were two people in the house with Tiwari — one of them a police officer — when she jumped off the balcony. The police officer is described as “a family friend” and it seems he tried to stop her, unsuccessfully.

Quoting the investigating officer, the Indian Express story informs the reader that Tiwari was targeted by a doctor she had exposed in her story. The policeman said, “Tiwari had conducted a sting operation on a local doctor who allegedly performed sex determination tests. But the doctor lodged an FIR with the police, saying Tiwari had been demanding Rs 2 lakh from him. She was suspended from her job following registration of the FIR.”

Indian Express also has accessed an email that Tiwari wrote to an unidentified friend, in which she discussed the sting and its repercussions. The article ends with the police promising to investigate the case thoroughly and a one-line statement that DNA had not responded to queries about Tiwari and her suicide.

Contrast this to Hindustan Times‘s report. Perhaps what is most unfair about this article is that it doesn’t give the reader any details about either the work Tiwari had done or the story that had changed her life. Instead, the newspaper chooses to describe her as “a journalist against whom an extortion case was recently registered”. The reader is not told that the case was in response to Tiwari accusing a doctor of malpractice. However, this detail is mentioned again, later in the article: “An FIR of cheating and extortion already stands registered against her on the complaint of a doctor couple and she was discussing the issue with her friends.”

The Tiwari we read of in HT is a discredited journalist and by implication, a dubious woman. The sort who has FIRs lodged against her, who drinks, who has close men friends.

We’re told Tiwari was drinking before she died, without providing any indication as to why this should be considered an important factor. Are we to assume that she was drunk and out of control and therefore jumped to her death? Is her decision to drink before and after dinner (imagine that! before and after!) an indication of her personality being unstable? We’re also given a fair amount of detail about one of her dinner guests: “Inspector Kumar joined the Faridabad police a few days after his transfer from the vigilance department. Officials said Kumar even visited Tiwari at her house in Indore.” There’s a sly hint in those sentences about Kumar and Tiwari being more than good friends, though what relevance that has to the suicide, is unclear. One can only wonder whether these details would have been considered even remotely relevant had Tiwari been a man.

HT also points out that although the eye witnesses say that she committed suicide at 11.45pm, the police was informed only at 3am. The article tells us, “But the Surajkund SHO said he got the information only at 3am. When the police along with crime team rushed to the scene, the body had been taken to a private hospital in Sector 21 and declared brought dead.”

Was it irresponsible of Tiwari’s companions to take her to a hospital in a desperate effort to save her life, rather than leave her on the pavement and wait for the crime team — that “rushed”, no less — to check her lifeless body out? The use of the “but” at the start of the sentence is telling. It tells the reader to be suspicious and wonder why the police were informed so late, when in fact the delay is easily explained.

We’ll probably never know exactly why Tiwari was driven to commit suicide. However, there are questions that her death raises that we would do well to not ignore because their answers play an important part in the freedom to which journalists are entitled.

Why was Tiwari suspended if there was nothing objectionable in her article? Considering the fact that it’s still available online, DNA evidently doesn’t think the story is inaccurate. If it stands by the story, should it not also stand by the person who wrote it? The reasoning behind DNA‘s decision to suspend Tiwari is one that they should explain. Especially if the investigations reveal that the doctors’ accusations are baseless, could that FIR and DNA‘s decision to suspend Tiwari be considered abetting suicide?

If a company, particularly a media organisation, will not stand behind its reporters, they stand vulnerable to attacks and harassment, which means that they’re ill-equipped to do the job that they’re supposed to do. Whether it’s an exposé like the one Tiwari had written or a film review, journalistic work has the capacity to upset people. Good stories almost always do. It falls upon the organisation that has either hired or commissioned the journalist to back its staff up. How will a journalist report and write fearlessly if they have to be cautious and can’t depend upon their organisation to support them?

Until police investigations provide evidence to suggest otherwise, Tiwari’s reputation should stand unblemished. Instead of assuming the worst of her the way HT did, let’s give her more than just the benefit of doubt. It’s the least we owe a young woman who may have had many more stories to tell, if she’d got the support every journalist deserves.

UPDATE: Pooja Tiwari worked with DNA‘s hyperlocal digital content platform, titled “I am in”. The article previously stated Tiwari worked for the main newspaper. This error has been corrected. “I am in” has sent a statement to Newslaundry saying, “She [Tiwari] was recently put under suspension after allegations were made against her, as part of the standard operating process for the company to be able to carry out the enquiry with fairness. However she was assured all the required support regarding the case, and her salary or even increments were not withheld during this time.”