Firstpost

When the money is not there, and you still have to attract eyeballs to lure advertisers, it is logical to look for short-cuts to make your programmes interesting. Thus TV shows become boxing rings for politicians to shout and scream at one another (but never to come to any conclusion), and print media has to focus on the bizarre and the salacious to garner custom. Large parts of the regional media are reduced to blackmail to get advertisers to pay up.

Which brings us back to Murdoch – and his relevance to Indian media ethics. Murdoch’s big contribution to the media world is that he made them viable by making newspapers exciting. But there is a point beyond which excitement cannot be sustained by natural means, even if those natural means include publishing blow-ups of buxom women with textile deficits. This is where his editors thought nothing about hacking the voicemails of ordinary people and paying policemen for information to get a rise out of their readers.

And this is precisely what is happening in India. We don’t know if newspapers or TV channels are hacking into people’s mails, but we do know that many senior journalists are probably political fixers, are aligned to specific political parties and vested interests, and are used by the police and politicians to plant stories that do damage to others. The US was widely criticised for using embedded journalists while prosecuting the war in Iraq, but in India, every media house is stuffed with journalists embedded in the organisation by vested interests.

Little wonder – barring a Tehelka here or an intrepid journalist there – news happens only by default. Take the case of the cash-for-votes scam. It broke in full TV view, when BJP politicians landed up in Parliament with wads of currency notes before the 2008 confidence vote. But the media took it as a mere tamasha. Parliament did a cursory examination and lobbed the ball in the Delhi police’s court. The Delhi police sat on it till the Supreme Court reminded them about it. Suddenly someone got arrested, and the media is full of stories again about who is going to be questioned.

But did the media do any followup work on who did what, and who the real culprits were? Tehelka probed it a bit further to suggest that it was probably a BJP sting operation that didn’t manage to snare the right Congress bait. So we ended up throwing Amar Singh’s flunky into jail. Does the media have to be reminded repeatedly to follow through on stories?

The popularity of sting operations is another piece of evidence that newspapers and TV channels want their scoops without cost or effort. While it does take courage and effort to enact a sting, this is actually the easy way out: anyone with a few thousand rupees can buy a pen-cam or button-cam to record TV footage clandestinely. It takes weeks or months of hard work to go for real documents and evidence to nail the corrupt.

In recent years, stings have yielded less and less by way of real scoops as most politicians have by now wised up to this reality. They now talk only to a very small trusted list of journos. Stings are now focused entirely on the unwary public: some hapless hospital staff, who turn away the poor, or stories like that. In fact, stings now work only when you unleash them on the absolutely weak and unwary. From focusing on the rich and crooked, stings now focus on the uneducated and the poor.

What this means is that we are going to increasingly use stings to invade the privacy of ordinary people or to do corporate damage in the name of an exclusive story – as the Radia tapes proved. They were used to settle scores in the telecom world. No one is safe. Not even Pranab Mukherjee, the Finance Minister.

When leaks and clandestine recording are increasingly going to be about the invasion of privacy and damaging people’s reputations, what sort of journalism are we conducting? The powerful, after briefly being the targets of sting operations, have now learnt to use the power of telephone recordings and spy-cam operations for their own ends. And we are willing tools in their hands, thanks to the fact that media owners do not want to invest in real journalism.

Somewhere, sometime, the whole economics of media operations needs to be given a relook by mediapersons themselves. And till this issue is sort out, we are going to be pawns in the hands of vested interests. That, and a stronger self-regulatory body, is the need of the hour.

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