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<b>Sunanda K Datta-Ray:</b> The media as Caesar's wife

Society's watchdog must be above suspicion and follow the discipline of transparency and accountability

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Sunanda K Datta-Ray New Delhi
Last Updated : Nov 30 2013 | 12:35 AM IST
History is made in bed. Those memorable words in a BBC radio programme recalled my Jesuit history teacher in Kolkata saying that Britain is a Protestant country because Henry VIII wanted to marry his "concubine" - Father Schepers' description of Anne Boleyn whom the king preferred to his Spanish Catholic first wife. Father Schepers also introduced me to Pascal's saying "If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter the whole history of the world would have been different".

But we needn't scale royal heights or delve into ancient times. The front page of most newspapers - except this one! - amply testifies to the reckless power of sex. What lurid reports of rape at society's lowest level don't disclose is that "the beast in our midst" (the theme of a session at the Goa Thinkfest that was locally dubbed "Stinkfest" even before scandal erupted) can prowl as predatorily in offices, including the media's. History is also made on the casting couch or, in a bizarre case I heard of many years ago, the editorial conference table. People in glass houses should not throw stones. That's the Tehelka affair's real message for the media. Society's watchdog must, like Caesar's wife, be above suspicion.

There are other revelations too. The first is the shameful condition of women despite a voluminous government White Paper on the subject and the higher judiciary's Gender Sensitivisation and Internal Complaints Committee. Second, legal attempts to help women are sometimes more fanciful than practical. Britain's Sexual Offences Act held a man guilty of rape if he impersonated a woman's husband to have intercourse with her. Our Evidence Act makes it almost impossible for any accused to plead consent in defence though, admittedly, the claim can be grossly abused. The role of employers in an underemployed society whose instinctive culture is obsequiousness to superiors and arrogance with inferiors comes third. These traits are so deeply ingrained that a colleague used to intone "The boss may not always be right but the boss is always the boss!" Other colleagues - leading names in the media - never addressed the editor as anything but "chief" or "boss".

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As mentioned earlier, the most important message is that a media that sits in judgement on the world must itself be blameless. W T Stead, the famous English journalist who once edited the Northern Echo - the second paper on which I served as a young reporter - and who is credited with inventing investigative journalism, grandly told a Royal Commission, "The simple faith of our forefathers in the All-Seeing Eye of God has departed from the Man in the Street. Our only modern substitute for Him is the Press."

Some of India's best-known newspaper magnates have been megalomaniacs without Stead's talent. But no modern working journalist would be so pretentious though I can think of a non-working journalist editor who used equally bombastic language about himself. What was infinitely worse was that behind the mask of pious crusader rampaged a grasping womaniser who left the institution of which he acquired control virtually bankrupt. One thinks of another editor who sacked a junior when the latter's wife who was his mistress (with her husband's acquiescence) took up with another man. In a third case, revenue officials were disconcerted to discover that the cash donations a businessman they were watching made every month and recorded in his private diary were not to a leading politician but an editor with the same initials. I wouldn't add open political affiliation as another sin but a paper's politics is often surreptitious and paid for.

Before me as I write is a clipping from the Himalayan Guardian published from Gangtok supporting Arun Jaitley's demand that the Right to Information Act should also cover media groups. As it rightly argues, the media is a public institution, and media representatives are influential decision-makers. The discipline of transparency and accountability should apply to them as stringently as to political parties and government departments.

Lee Kuan Yew incurred the International Press Institute's wrath by rejecting as a Western myth the notion that a free press curbs corruption. "The media itself is corrupted," he raged, citing several Asian countries. Lee didn't include India but judging by the evidence - from what Nehru called the "jute press" to the affair of the Radia Tapes - India may not be an exception. This question of the media's overall probity, integrity and objectivity should concern Markandey Katju more than the narrow focus of sexual harassment. The media is society's watchdog but even watchdogs need some watching.

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Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper

First Published: Nov 29 2013 | 10:44 PM IST

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