Why lose sleep? Let a thousand exposés bloom

Rajat Sharma

A “sting” has different effects on different people. MPs worry. Rival media get angry. The aam janta smiles.

Why blame the MP? If you’re caught taking cash for questions, if you are shown enjoying Dawood Ibrahim’s company, you would obviously hate it, and talk of freedom being taken too far.

Why blame the media? If you had the Govinda video or the cash-for-questions footage, you would’ve shown it off. Since you don’t, you’ll moralise and talk of the Rubicon separating journalism and gimmickry.

Why blame the aam aadmi? You see these honourable men being caught making fools of themselves, you love it; and you derive some entertainment from it, and some hope.

We should know. At India TV, where the sting operation is an important tool in the tough journalism we offer day after day, our work has rewarded us with all these three sets of feedback.

When we played tapes of Swaminarayan sadhus having sex with devotees or ex-MPs and sitting MLAs with women supplied by contractor mafias, and when we revealed two well-known actors making pathetic solicitations to “an aspiring actress,” many of those who didn’t like it were people in positions from which they could abuse their authority. Some were nice enough to say this to our face. Some others did talk shows. Others wrote signed pieces about India TV’s quest for TRPs, almost as if ‘TRPs’ was a four-letter word. 

Similar things happened when we showed the video of the Virar MP. He attacked me, on ‘Breaking News’, for being bigamous! We gently corrected his bad research and let him rant and rave for two-and-a-half hours, perhaps the longest-ever interview on live news television in India.

When we got hold of Greg Chappell’s email from a BCCI computer, and shared the spoils in an exclusive tie-up with DNA, some columns claimed they knew the ‘operative part’ anyway. It’s another matter that chunks of the email were cut and pasted from India TV’s news tickers — and DNA’s front page — in a matter of hours.

Indeed, ‘cash-for-questions’ isn’t the first time this debate on journalistic ethics has raised its head. It is not even the first time this issue has happened. The Sunday Times offered £1,000 each to 10 Labour MPs and 10 Conservatives back in 1994. The difference between the British newspapers and ours was that they were less preachy and more sporting. Each time someone wins, there will be losers. And the losers will either try to make alliances, or cry.

Yes, there should be checks. But how? “Freedom gone too far, specially of the electronic kind” is best left to the judgement of the consumer.

In an ideal world, we would’ve had some magical software that helps us draw the line between the trivial and the consequential. I suspect there isn’t a market or else Bill Gates and the thousands of smart kids who work for him would have made one. Just in case they do and an all-too-willing babu in the Indian government buys it, I’d still suggest that we let the consumer decide. He sure knows how to sift. Every waking moment, he sifts among leaks and gossip and rumours. He sifts among local newspapers. He sifts among a million sites on the web. He sifts among what he has just learnt vis-à-vis what he knew until yesterday. Surely, he can sift among half-a-dozen news channels and a few dozen stings.

Believe me, the consumer knows best.

The writer is editor-in-chief of India TV.