Power of press

(bdnews24.com, December 10, 2010)

The Indian media has been shaken somewhat over the last few weeks by what could only be called “indiscreet behaviour”. Two very senior journalists — people who have been listened to, read, respected over the past so many years — are in the dock for being inappropriately involved with a matter that has reached judicial proportions, with those involved in it being indicted by opinion, the press and, to some extent, the government in India. They insist that they were only stringing along their “source” to get more information on the story that they were independently investigating, but many beg to differ on that one.

After all, being responsible journalists, responsible adults and responsible human beings, they should have known what they were doing and understood their limits. Most of all, being public figures with popular television shows and print columns to their credit, they should have realised when they were crossing that fine line between investigation and involvement, and kept the distance that is so important in such situations. But they did not.

And the media — rivals or else-wise — is working hard to generate support on the one hand and, on the other, to make it clear that this is just not done. There are no apologies forthcoming, no believable excuses for what happened, no real reasons for it to be done. And the scandal value has dwindled to almost nothingness, the breaking news that it was just last week fading off the headlines and being relegated to the inside pages of papers that have nothing else to report.

Why did it happen? Who knows, except for one small point that is well known but rarely accepted by those involved: the journalists had started thinking that they were truly powerful; their word, such as it was, had to be accepted without questions asked, with no terms and conditions attached, no sanity check. Why? Simply because for years they have been the voice of that same sanity; their words have been taken for Gospel, the whole truth, reliable, honest, unbiased. But, as one of the two people concerned said when he was spot lit by the media for his role in the matter, it only takes a moment of indiscretion to wipe out 30 years of solid reputation. His name, for its immediate recall value, is now ‘mud’. The same can be said of the lady involved in the fracas — her television news show is well-known and looked forward-to, her interviews hard-hitting and incisive, her face and her voice famed for their presence whenever, wherever there is news to be reported.

And now both these luminaries, winners of more awards than a single person has a right to, have a somewhat tarnished public image.

All simply because they thought they were inviolate and all-powerful, people who could make things happen with a mere wave of a verb, conduits for a change that would normally take much longer and a lot more effort than one individual could manage to put in. Why? Because they had already tasted that heady sense of power, had already made things happen, had already influenced not just public opinion, but powerful opinion-makers too.

As senior journalists with an impressive body of work behind them, they had lobbied successfully to make change happen, be it increased privileges for the armed forces or greater protection for endangered big cats. But in trying to, as they both separately insisted, elicit information from a source as they worked to break a story that could shatter sections of the government, they overstepped their limits, blurring the lines between reporter and lobbyist, seemingly aiming to influence the flow of power rather than explore its tides and discover what the power equation actually was all about. In doing so, in getting a little too personally entangled, they have managed to not just mess with their own images, but push the entire press community into the spotlight, making almost anything that is done in the quest for a story, questionable. Responsible journalism? Perhaps not! Time for some kind of control mechanism to be implemented in journalistic research? Perhaps, yes!

In 1887 Lord Acton wrote to Bishop Creighton saying, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” A more fitting paraphrase attributed to William Pitt, British prime minister in 1766-1778 goes: “Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.” With great power comes great responsibility — the responsibility to see that it is used with discretion, intelligence and, most of all, common sense.