Surrender to the media
The insistence of the Mahajan gang of friends to approach the police not directly but through the media is an interesting development. It is part of an increasing tendency to use the media for diverse purposes.
The insistence of the Mahajan gang of friends to approach the police not directly but through the media is an interesting development. It is part of an increasing tendency to use the media for diverse purposes. Is this desirable? Or healthy? Is it a compliment to the media which, at first blush, it appears to be?
When the youngsters and/or their parents in the Mahajan episode decided to speak up, they went first to a TV channel. A variety of their explanations were telecast in some form or the other though the actual interviews were not. Mahajan acolyte Sudhanshu Mittal also suddenly surfaced in several channels giving his detailed version of events. Some months ago, another channel had several hours of live and recorded exchanges between a father on the one hand (a senior serving bureaucrat) and his son and daughter-in-law on the other, trading serious charges relating to the custody of the bureaucrat’s grand-daughter. The charges ranged from kidnapping and adultery to verbal and physical abuse. No one thought of calling the police.
This trend of surrender before the media (or is it one of media in surrender) is bad both for the media and the dramatis personae in these human dramas. The latter tend to get carried away and make several emotional and casual statements. They are invariably without legal assistance. Unintentionally, they provide a live recording of careless and casual statements which can frequently have serious consequences. Contradictions abound and often depict the individuals concerned in a much worse light than intended by their deliberate media self-exposure.
The media, on the other hand, is driven, first and foremost, by TRP and viewership considerations. In this competitive race for hype and novelty, truth and objective fact is obviously the first casualty. The anchor must necessarily turn on the emotional and subjective screws. Salacious innuendo adds vital spice to the media cocktail. The media become an obstruction to police investigation. Indeed, the policing agencies and, more importantly, the adjudicatory body, are influenced, howsoever subconsciously, by the enormous media hype and the seemingly overwhelming public opinion it claims to project.
But both life and law have repeatedly taught us that appearances are usually deceptive and that finite situations and solutions are usually heavily outnumbered by grey areas which are more likely to be ignored by the quickfixes that instant media provide.
The sub judice rule has thus virtually perished — only its formal burial and the singing of an appropriate requiem for it remain.
In most high profile criminal cases, the media free-for-all has a direct effect — beneficial or prejudicial to the accused as the case may be — on the threshold and primary adjudicatory body, especially on issues of bail and undertrial incarceration. It is difficult, if not impossible, to get a completely fair, unbiased, impartial adjudication on issues of bail in the charged atmospherics created by an omnipresent and omniscient media.
The media can also selectively create a hero or an icon without being careful about the human values it is projecting in the process. I have held for long held that if an established goonda from the badlands of Dhanbad decided to reinvent himself, he only has to anonymously migrate to Delhi, after which, if he intelligently throws a few high profile parties for six months, he would be lionized by the visual and ‘Page 3’ media and become an established icon of Delhi. His past, his origin, his history, his career path as also his human failings will quickly be ignored or forgotten in the glare and glitter which the media creates and magnifies. I can think of more than one candidate who fits the bill on this count.
This also creates an uneven playing field between those who know how to misuse the media and those who do not. A bureaucrat or politician in the first category gets away with murder while a sincere and hardworking member of the second category gets left behind in both progress and prosperity. Most disturbing is the propensity of the media to demand and generate expectations for instant answers and solutions and to convince the media audience that what they are witnessing at the moment of its occurrence is the ultimate truth. In this, the media not only eliminates a long-term perspective, it virtually makes medium-term thinking irrelevant and short-term planning superfluous. Instantaneous reactions and quickfixes supersede all else.
No external standard or law can cure or regulate this. We will eventually have a content regulator but that will not, and cannot, be a panacea. It is only introspection, not individually but collectively, by the movers and shakers of the media as also of society, which can evolve a set of informal guidelines, which, over time and by voluntary observance, will form a bedrock of conventions. That is a far more solid foundation than any coercive law. That is a foundation which alone will show that Indian media has truly come of age.