MAM
Jaskirat Singh Bawa: From fake news fighter to corporate firefighter
NEW DELHI: After nearly two decades of chasing lies across the internet and building teams to debunk them, Jaskirat Singh Bawa has decided that corporates need saving too. He’s just joined Edelman as senior advisor for risk and issues management, trading his role as global head of editorial operations at Logically for the rarefied air of strategic counsel.
It’s a natural progression for someone who’s spent the better part of his career in the trenches of digital warfare. At Logically, Bawa built a 60-strong, 16-language operation spanning 12 countries, generating £2.2m in annual revenue whilst keeping Meta, TikTok, Snap, and Google’s reputations from going completely sideways. Not a bad CV for someone who started as a television correspondent covering the supreme court.
Now he’s tackling a different beast: helping organisations navigate coordinated disinformation campaigns, bot-driven attacks, and AI-powered threats that spread faster than a tweet from a verified account. Deep fakes, synthetic narratives, automated networks—the whole ghastly digital carnival that keeps PR chiefs awake at night. Edelman’s betting that Bawa’s expertise in risk sensing and crisis response will prove rather useful as companies grapple with geopolitics, culture wars, and the occasional coordinated attack by bots with questionable parentage.
The move reunites him with Edelman India managing director of public and government affairs Vasudevan Rangarajan with whom he once shared field reporting duties in their television days. Also in the mix is Pierre Fitter, a law school chum who’s been on a parallel journey from live news to tackling global disinformation. Nothing like a bit of professional nostalgia to sweeten a career pivot.
Bawa’s pedigree is impeccable for the age of online mayhem. He co-founded WebQoof, one of India’s first fact-checking desks at The Quint, back when fake news was still a novelty rather than a daily plague. Before that, he covered elections, corruption scandals, and flash floods for India Today and NewsX, racking up 10,000 km on the road during the 2014 general elections as field producer for Election Express. He’s a US State Department IVLP Fellow, member of the Trust & Safety Professionals Association, and has provided expert commentary to everyone from the BBC to Bellingcat.
At Edelman, he’ll wield “state-of-the-art AI-powered social listening tools” and tap into the firm’s multidisciplinary global team—corporate speak for “we’ve got the tech and the talent to spot trouble before it trends.” Whether that’s enough to tame the wild west of digital disinformation remains to be seen, but if anyone’s qualified to try, it’s someone who’s already fought that war on multiple fronts.
One thing’s certain: in a world where a deep fake can tank a share price before lunch, Bawa’s particular set of skills are rather in demand. And Edelman’s just written the cheque to prove it.
