Inside a TV news station determined to report facts in the Taliban's Afghanistan

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/08/ [login to see] /afghanistan-taliban-media-journalists
Inside a cramped and windowless room at the headquarters of Afghanistan's leading news channel, a group of young editors race against a six o'clock deadline.

One fiddles with the audio for a story on the year-long closure of girls' secondary schools. Another tinkers with the images of Taliban officials at an international conference. They are stories that will be featured in that evening's broadcast from TOLOnews.

When the Taliban returned to power last year, few expected Afghanistan's first 24/7 news channel to survive. The first time the group was in power, in the 1990s, radios mostly carried Islamic programming and propaganda, and TVs were banned. After they were toppled in 2001, the Taliban spent the next couple of decades staging deadly attacks, often against journalists. In 2016, seven TOLO TV employees were killed by a Taliban suicide bomber.

Despite that history, the Taliban have let this democratic institution stand. But every day is a struggle for the journalists who still work there.