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VIEWPOINT: RIGHT ANGLE
Lynch
Mob Journalism
To
achieve a political end the media junked professional norms.
By Swapan Dasgupta
 Among
the more astonishing features of the press conference in Delhi last week
addressed by Union ministers Nitish Kumar, M. Venkaiah Naidu and the hapless
Srinivasa Prasad was their collective reluctance to attack shoddy journalism.
Here was an open and shut case of Tehelka falsely implicating a minister
of receiving bribes and the evidence instead pointing to the journalist's
own desperation to thrust a Rs 2 lakh "donation" into some unknown
and unseen hands. But instead of frontally charging the dotcom with unethical
practices, the ministers directed their flak at the Opposition for trying
to make political capital of this particular falsehood. The reason was
self-evident to every member of political class: the media is a formidable
trade union and an attack on any one inevitably results in the journalistic
equivalent of secondary picketing.
An intrusive media has always been an occupational
hazard of democratic politics. Its relentless search for information,
fuelled by competition and market rivalries, may be an irritant to those
who believe accountability is a once-in-five-years exercise. But at a
time when parliamentary debate has been debased by MPs who insist on jumping
into the well of the House for effect, the media has stepped into the
void, playing the role of both educator and entertainer. This is an awesome
responsibility which, if exercised diligently, can strengthen democratic
institutions. Unfortunately, the Tehelka tapes have exposed India to the
howls of a media-led lynch mob.
The issue is not the ethics of journalists masquerading
as defence suppliers and brazenly bribing their way into a story. Both
play acting and the candid camera are acceptable instruments of news gathering,
particularly when more conventional approaches can't yield results. In
the ethical scale, Tehelka's methods correspond to the use of phone tapping
and other electronic interception for policing. To that extent, the vivid
images of Bangaru Laxman nonchalantly accepting wads of currency notes
and then promising help from the Prime Minister's Office clearly exposed
the ethical laxity of the president of the BJP. That is an embarrassment
that both the BJP and the Government have to live with for a very long
time.
Tehelka organised a sting operation aimed at
implicating as many ministers and politicians as possible in a bribery
scandal. It cast its net far and wide but succeeded in frontally compromising
only Laxman, some defence ministry officials and a few army officers.
Unfortunately, that would have made a lesser story so it based its assault
on George Fernandes and Brajesh Mishra on the strength of loose talk of
wannabe fixers. It projected the boastful assertions of both R.K. Jain
and R.K. Gupta-not the best known of people in the corridors of power-as
gospel to target Fernandes and Mishra. There was absolutely no attempt
to assess their political and business standing, weigh their claims or
back it with other evidence. When confronted, Tehelka contemptuously dismissed
its lapses as "details".
That's where Tehelka has done a disservice to
the media. Its destabilisation of the Government and removal of Fernandes
were effected in a deliberately contrived environment where the lynch
mob mentality prevailed. The Tehelka tapes were a very successful exercise
in political supari but in journalistic terms it was plain tendentious.
The elementary norms of verification and corroboration were expediently
given the go-by because facts wouldn't have coincided with the images
and sound-bites of the spycam.
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