Saturday, November 20, 2010

The "gate" that isn't

The latest controversy that seems to be brewing all over India, except where it usually brews (TV media rooms, of course) is quite inappropriately titled "barkhagate". In fact, #barkhagate seems to be the most trending topic in twitter for the last two days. The controversy is of course the one surrounding the tapped phone conversations of corporate PR honcho Niraa Radia. NDTV’s Barkha Dutt, happens to be one of the many people Niraa Radia spoke to, while DMK and its Raja (though some say he is just their pawn) where deciding how to rob lakhs of crores of rupees.

The conversations with Barkha, as even the editor of Open (the magazine which published the phone transcripts) admitted, does not look remarkable. Most of it deal with quite boring information on the technicalities of which DMK MP gets what portfolio in the cabinet. The journalist was clearly eliciting as much information from her source, and her PR friend was in turn asking (as quid pro quo?) what her sources (in Congress) where telling her.

Clearly there was nothing remarkable in this. For how else have we developed a habit of knowing most government decisions beforehand. We expect our journalists to provide us as much information as possible, from their various sources, before it is formally announced. In this process of eliciting information, the journalist apparently promised to communicate to Congress leaders what her source is hearing from the DMK.

Nothing remarkable there either. But it does feel inappropriate if not unethical, that a media person communicates to a political party what a corporate agent representing another political party wants her to tell. Then there is the question of relying too heavily on information from corporate agents (Vir Sanghvi’s conversation underlines this point) and how this could affect the balance in a story.

Questions of impropriety aside, Barkha Dutt’s communication with Niraa Radia does not involve anything else to qualify it as another “Gate”. To say that she was lobbying for Raja is preposterous, to say the least. Also tweeting eye-catching nonsense such as “Barkha Dutt named in 2G scam” is nothing less than a vulgar smear campaign.

Naming a serious scandal Barkhagate, while doing injustice to the journalist, also trivializes the issue. Anyway, the term Barkhagate is quite tasteless and shows how unimaginative one can get. But then again, hasn’t the media been doing the same thing. Whenever they smell any semblance of a controversy, don’t’ they “gate” it. Does not media trivialize larger issues, give eye-catching nonsense as headlines and function under the assumption that everyone except the holier than thou media is corrupt. Isn’t the media now, to put it bluntly, getting a taste of its own medicine.

Why the heck does it attach the gate suffix to all issues and non-issues? How many Indians, if not the media persons who name these stories, are really aware of the facts original gate- “Dick” Nixon’s Watergate. Why was it called Watergate? Did America have one of our classic water crisis during Nixon’s rule? Creating a controversy, “Gating” it and Nixonizing the individuals associated with the Gate has been our classic media story. Our Nixon is always assumed to be guilty by the media. There is little examination into the nuances of the story and Nixon seldom gets to tell his side of the story (though the real Nixon had this opportunity).

And even when it is shown that the person in question has done nothing illegal or immoral, the media asks- Was it proper/ethical/ideal for the person to have talked to/have links with/ have seen together with so and so? If this is the level of scrutiny the media exercises on others, shouldn’t it adhere to similar standards for itself. Why cannot media introspect? Why shy away from asking tough questions about how they themselves work?

It seems quite ironical that the eerie silence on the issue is justified by the media on the ground that “proof” of quid pro quo was absent in this case. When the hell did the media start looking at proof before holding people guilty? And even if it did, why is it that the burden of proof is so much higher for a journalist than any other class of citizen. When it can “gate” anything that appears to be improper, why can‘t it even report- objectively- about the existence of these tapes. Barkhagate doesn’t sound so inappropriate now.

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