Culled from DNA by G Sampath
The complete blackout of the Niira Radia tapes by the entire broadcast
media and most of the major English newspapers paints a truer picture
of corruption in the country than the talk shows in the various news
channels and the breast-beating in all the newspapers about the 2G,
CWG, Adarsh, and other scams.
The website, NewspostIndia.com has this to say about this phenomenon,
"The self anointed flag bearers of the third pillar were caught red
handed as the Nira Radia tapes were leaked online by Open and Outlook
Magazine. These tapes show the corruption nexus between top
journalists such as Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Prabhu Chawla and
Vir Sanghvi and political parties and corporate lobbyists. Some print
media outlets, such as Mail Today, and foreign media giants carried
these revelations. However our very own prime time television news
channels NDTV, CNN-IBN, TimesNow, Headlines Today etc. launched a
cover up of the news from the public in order to protect their own."
It is quite possible that Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi never lobbied
for Raja or for anyone else. But it is quite clear from the tapes that
they were by no means practising journalism in their conversations
with Radia. What they were doing, is acting as liaison officers for
political parties and business houses. In fact, if all those
conversations were merely in the course of 'journalistic duty', why
this strange black-out?
But what is really scary is that, despite living in a 'democracy' that
boasts of a 'free press', if you were dependant only on TV and the big
newspapers for the biggest news developments of the day, you would
never have known about the Niira Radia tapes, and the murky role of
mediapersons as political power brokers. Indeed, the main source of
information on this scandal has been online media, such as
newspostindia.com, various bloggers, and social networking sites such
as Facebook and Twitter, and of course, the websites of Outlook and
Open magazines.
The question that the Barkha Dutts and the Rajdeep Sardesais of the
world have to answer is: How can you purport to be a news channel and
ignore completely the biggest news break of the day for two days
running (Nov 18 and 19)? Sure, say that those tapes are rubbish.
Defend your journalists all you want. Do whatever, but how can you
pretend to your audience — many of whom anyway have been listening to
the tapes from the Open and Outlook and YouTube websites — that they
never happened? I mean, how daft is that?
And even if those tapes, reportedly recorded by the IT department,
were not authentic, the very fact that the entire broadcast media
(bitter rivals for TRPs and ad revenues on normal days) ganged up to
black it out shows that they have something to hide. Just as
politicians bail each other out in scam-time, it appears journalists
do the same.
Outlook prefaces its tape transcripts with the comments, "Radia's
conversations show how even cabinet berths can be decided by this
select oligarchy. Her interface with discredited (now former) telecom
minister A. Raja, DMK MP Kanimozhi and Ranjan Bhattacharya, the foster
son-in-law of former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, shows how
she successfully lobbied for several cabinet berths. The transcripts
suggest that journalists Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt also lobbied for
Raja with the Congress party. However, both journalists, in separate
statements, decried the use of the label 'lobbyist' and termed their
conversation with Radia as part of their normal journalistic duties."
At the same time, it is worth noting that neither Barkha nor any of
the other journalists whose names have come up have denied that those
conversations took place. So why not let the reader or TV viewer read
or listen to the transcripts and decide whether Dutt and Sanghvi's
conversations with Radia are a part of "normal journalistic duties" or
amount to pimping for politicians and business houses? Or perhaps they
were doing social service for the Congress? Play the tapes on your
show, na, Ms Dutt, instead of tweeting about them? Why not let 'We,
The People' decide, instead of you deciding for us all?
Newspostindia.com observes, "The media in the free world prides itself
on impartiality. In India, they're in bed with the ruling elites. If
these individuals or the companies they represent had any ethics or
standards, we would have seen resignations by now."
Earlier this week, I had contacted the former Central Vigilance
Commissioner (CVC) N Vittal for a story I was working on. He spoke at
length about the vicious cycle of the neta-babu-lala-jhola-dada who
have "scientifically perfected" corruption. But Vittal left out one
vital link in the chain — the media professional.
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