It's not often these days that bookshops are opening - rather than closing. And, what's more, are spacious enough to accommodate a sufficient number of interested people to hold a discussion around books or writerly pursuits. So it was a pleasant surprise recently to step into a spanking new shop in Santa Cruz, in suburban Mumbai, called The Reader's Shop for a panel discussion on "Media! Where is thy sting?" The store's basement had hundreds of books along the walls, and was liberally strewn with cane chairs that would permit people to read at leisure.
The panel was organised by Humanscape magazine, and consisted of three journalists. Arun Sadhu, a veteran who has now retired from active journalism, spoke first and was very much the old school. He deplored sting journalism in general and even questioned Arun Shourie's celebrated expose of Maharashtra Chief Minister Antulay in the early 1980s. One can still recall the title of the first part of the searing front-page series in the Indian Express, which was "Indira Gandhi as Commerce". The series revealed how the wily CM was taking a percentage of every bag of cement sold for an Indira Gandhi Pratishtan, a somewhat ham-handed method of raising funds for the Congress party. Antulay had to resign for his misdemeanours; his reputation was already dubious even before this, but with the expose he was well and truly finished politically.
According to Sadhu, Shourie was not quite the media knight in shining armour. There were dissensions within the Congress party, and the anti-Antulay faction engineered this investigation. Nor was this a closely-held secret: to anyone connected with the building trade, it was open knowledge at the time. All the same, Sadhu was probably protesting too much: it is one thing to be aware of some scandal somewhere, and quite another to publish it. Precisely the same situation arose at a morning editorial conference of The Times of India early in 1977, when Mrs. Gandhi was to call elections to legitimise her emergency.
That morning, the story had been scooped by Kuldip Nayar in the Indian Express - come to think of it, so many exclusives, including the Bhagalpur blindings and, more recently, the murder of Satyendra Dubey, the junior engineer who exposed corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral project, have featured in this intrepid newspaper, which must be a tribute to its feisty founder, the late Ramnath Goenka. At the morning conference, ToI editor Girilal Jain poured scorn over the story, remarking that everyone (who mattered, obviously!) in Delhi knew about it. An otherwise taciturn Assistant Editor, G.M. Telang, piped up: "But he had the courage to publish it!" - which was surely the point.
• Political expediency in journalism
And for that matter, the dissensions within a political party - or any other major establishment, including corporate
bodies - is surely the stuff of which scoops are made. Everyone talks about Deep Throat, the mysterious and unidentified source who fed
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the intrepid reporters of the Washington Post who broke the Watergate story and ultimately brought
President Richard Nixon down. Deep Throat, recently revealed to be former FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, was obviously disenchanted with
"Tricky Dickie's" misdemeanours in bugging the Democrat's party office in the Watergate hotel and telling outright lies about other
matters. He would not have been operating on his own, but representing an entire section of the administration who objected to such
underhand methods. But that ought not in any way detract from the two reporters' devastating scoop.
While there are many misgivings about Shourie's ideological predilections - incidentally, his latest book, Governance, waxes eloquent about the NDA government's initiatives with his ministry's disinvestment of public sector enterprises, but has been overshadowed by the current scandal surrounding the sale of the Juhu Centaur hotel - one should give the devil his due for unseating Antulay. Many have also forgotten that when he was the Executive Editor of the Indian Express earlier, he published an article by K.F. Rustomji, a member of the National Police Commission, about the abysmal plight of undertrial prisoners in prisoners. From memory, a public interest litigation was filed on their behalf and around 30,000 such prisoners, who had served more than the sentence they would have received had they been convicted, were let off, which is surely a big achievement on the part of any journalist.
The second speaker was the well-known columnist V. Gangadhar, who quite rightly ridiculed the "couching cast" sting, which was virtually entrapment. It may have earned India TV a few TRPs for some moments of glory, but it has done the channel far more harm than good for calling into question its credibility, which is by far the most precious thing that any mass media enjoys. The third speaker, Thomas Abraham, who edits the website indiantelevision.com, also queried why there was no public curiosity when Indian TV exposed politicians in earlier sting operations, which this correspondent was even unaware of.
There were, inevitably, many references to the Tehelka operation, where BJP politicians, George Fernandes, and several senior army brass were exposed in an undercover operation. This would constitute a legitimate exercise, but the speakers questioned the validity of such stings, considering that the only casualty was the BJP Treasurer, since Fernandes was subsequently reinstated as Defence Minister. Ironically, the only other casualty was Tehelka itself, which was hounded into bankruptcy, along with a couple who ran a finance company which had in good faith invested in the pioneering website.
Abraham made a controversial presentation, where he stressed how readers now had the choice of choosing between different media: newspapers, according to him, were almost passé; there were TV channels, websites and blogs, where one could fashion the news to suit oneself. He emphasised that news could be directed at the level of communities, rather than some amorphous mass readership, which he believed would be more relevant. But the newspaper's job is to inform the mass of people and help them make up their minds on issues of national and global importance. They were failing to do so, but if anything the websites and blogs were only targeting individuals, not society as a whole, and could not replace the mass media. Abraham's plea sounded suspiciously like the campaign for DNA - Daily News & Analysis, the forthcoming Mumbai daily - to the effect that it would speak directly to the reader, who could dictate the content.
This would amount, if one can paraphrase the ads, to DNA addressing itself only to those readers who could afford to buy the goods and services that would be advertised in this medium, whatever the protestations to the contrary. In a globalised world, the idea that a newspaper would speak to the nation or city as a whole, for most classes, seems to have fallen by the wayside. This is a pernicious doctrine, as pernicious as the assumption that globalisation is here to stay and to entrench itself even more strongly in the hearts and minds only of those who are already well-to-do.
