some media bashing

The recent self-righteous and smug display of moral outrage over the IPL by the media, the politicians, and any and everyone who wants to be heard without having anything substantial to say is ridiculously funny and tragic at the same time. The ever-increasing impact of the media can have no better manifestation than this imbroglio. Speculative reporting, uninformed opinions, and shameless sensationalism has been the hallmark of media houses over the past decade or so. Lately, however, it has touched a new low with absolute disregard for accountability and answerablity. How often do we see reports citing ‘informed sources’ or ‘insiders comments’? That the media influences the actions of the state was exemplified by the sudden surge of allegations of financial misconduct, uproars in parliament and the abrupt probes into the so-called IPL scam. In a country where financial misconduct is almost a norm, the alacrity with which state agencies swooped down upon the IPL was ridiculous and absurd. And the media, which was crying hoarse over how the IPL is a ‘murky’ and sinister undertaking clammed up, all of a sudden. There was no attempt to substantiate the charges leveled, and no reporting of what the tax raids and crack-downs unearthed The sickening slander and attacks on individuals vanished into thin air as soon as the situation veered away from speculative to substantive.


And this was not the first instance that the media transgressed over its role as a reporter to a creator of news or a self-appointed opinion-builder. The Nithari killings were a shocking example of how the media can create abominable villains without bothering about even a shred of evidence. The fact that Moninder Singh Pandher was acquitted by the courts was conveniently ignored by the media. This is largely because our collective conscious loves to hate. Branding someone as a cannibal and coming up with macabre analyses of the gory details of the killings, the media never even bothered to ponder upon the fact that no one is guilty until proven. Letting their imagination run riot, the media actually weaved up stories of illicit relations, and the tragic possibility of a father killing his daughter in the Arushi murder case in Delhi. The sole aim of the media in these instance and many more, was to introduce shock value, the more implausible and horrifying the claims, the better. This tendency surfaced once again in the systematic slander against Sunanda Pushkar.

Invariably, the media loves to feed upon the clichés and beliefs of the majority. The insinuation that a single woman has to indulge in some hanky-panky to become successful reeks of the shameful regressive mores, redolent of Madhur Bhandarkar movies.

Around a year back, a vernacular daily in MP cited ‘informed sources’ to claim that the ‘Big Bang’ experiment might lead to the end of the world. Recently, leading electronic and print media reported unauthorized border intrusions by China, again, citing ‘highly placed government officials.

There will be numerous such vignettes on the recent IPL scam, like the claim that the I-T department has prepared a investigation report related to alleged match fixing and betting in IPL. The fact that the I-T department completely denied any investigations except the alleged tax frauds doesn’t bar the media from continuously toeing the betting line, and setting up panels and discussions on match fixing and betting at the IPL. And by now we would all have heard an acquaintance or two waxing eloquent about how he always knew that the IPL was fixed. Amid all the bellicose claims and counter-claims, initiated by the media and conveniently picked up the politicians and the susceptible media consumer, no-one bothered to check the veracity and credibility of these reports. How many of us know what are the exact charges leveled against Lalit Modi and what is the substantiation of these charges, or what exactly is the much discussed ‘sweat equity’ which brought innumerable riches to the vampish man-eating sunanda pushkar. We smugly concluded that out long-held beliefs were finally being vindicated.

What makes it all the more sinister is the impact of such irresponsible reporting. Pandher, the ‘cannibal’, was brutally assaulted by a group of lawyers, and will bear a lifelong stigma. The parliamentarians went into a tizzy about how the opposition had its hands full with the dirty money from the IPL. In a country where the legal recourse takes years to materialize, we have Joint Parliamentary Committees set up in a matter of days to probe the financial conduct of the whole IPL bandwagon. Yes, media vigilantism does have its positive aspects, but lately things have gone a bit too far and the result of it all is a growing skepticism developing towards the authenticity of the media, which was considered to a infallible and reliable not too long back.