Peeping Toms Of Gobar Journalism

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Blackmail Not New To Media, Arnab

First, someone called Sten Lindstrom comes out with supposedly new revelations about the Bofors scandal. Chitra Subramaniam, who originally broke the whole story and followed it for long also surfaced after all these years to talk about it. Some in the Indian media were quick to dub Lindstrom the Swedish ‘Deep Throat’, after the famous Watergate Deep Throat (William Mark Felt). On a lighter side, they do share something in common though. The Watergate deep throat was named after a controversial porn movie titled ‘DeepThroat’ which was released in the same year as the Watergate burglary and the Swedish DeepThroat comes after the infamous Abhishek Manu Singhvi sex tapes. The remote similarity ends there. There’s just one small difference: the original DeepThroat led to a dozen or so convictions leading up to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The so-called Swedish DeepThroat is still where Bofors is – Zero convictions. Of the 64 crores of bribes in Bofors not a single rupee has been recovered, not a single conviction has happened and some of the players are dead. In contrast, by strange coincidence, another case of bribery involving Bangaru Laxman, former president of BJP, in a sting operation by Tehelka came to a conclusion. Today Bangaru was sentenced to four years in prison and a fine of Rs.1 Lakh, the same amount of bribe he has been convicted of taking.

The CBI court judge, sentencing Bangaru Laxman, said it is time to "shun" the "sab chalta hai" (It's OK, whatsoever!) attitude and courts should deal strictly with persons found guilty of corruption. With all due respects, your honour, most corruption cases don’t end up in courts, they are washed up by our govt and our media. Worse, in my belief the Bangaru Laxman case was one of a fake operation and more of ‘entrapment’ by a journal seeking ‘instant’ fame rather than genuine investigative journalism. It’s a classic case of journalism by ‘script writing’ rather than investigating actual events and wrong-doings. But that is not even the issue here.

Within hours of Laxman’s conviction our media was clamouring to equate Bofors with Bangaru. Rajdeep Sardesai, who called the 64 crores of Bofors scam “loose change” in comparison to current scams like 2G, suddenly found the 1 lakh bribe case similar to Bofors. He’s not the only one though. Arnab Goswami, who runs his own private court on TV, actually ran a debate “Bofors V Bangaru” on TimesNow on the night of Friday, April 27. The debate involved Meenakshi Lekhi (BJP), Vinod Sharma (Smirk Times), Manish Tewari (Head to Toe fame) and a couple more people. In the melee the discussion ended up in a question by Arnab to Lekhi: “Are journalists being accused of blackmailing?” (In the context of the Tehelka type spurious sting operations). Hmmm! Arnab shot that without thinking too much.

Long back I had narrated how media outlets approach corporate entities to get their share of ads that were released with a competitor. Nothing wrong with that, except that where companies were reluctant, the second-rung media threatened them with exposure of various misdeeds by the company. Not unusual considering most companies are in the practice of avoiding excise, customs or other taxes. The journals and journalists keep a dossier on the misdeeds of such companies and use it to blackmail them into running campaigns in their journals similar to the ones run in other media. This gets even better when the media outlet has juicy tidbits of the private lives of the CEOs or owners of businesses. Don’t be surprised if you even find govt officials or police officials under payroll of a media outlet. Once such officials are ‘sanitised’ they then remain obligated to leak news and confidential reports. Else!

One of the most glaring cases of journalists blackmailing a businessman comes from the house of Arnab’s own group – The Times Group. Sure, Arnab wasn’t associated with the group then but he’s seriously mistaken to imagine journalists don’t indulge in extortion and blackmailing. Here’s the interesting story:

“Such spurious news has included gushing endorsements of flop movies, fashion and lifestyle products and the promotion of hotels and restaurants that enter into a payment arrangement with the organisation. The reader has no clue that the adulatory report is nothing but a paid advertisement masquerading as objective reportage or opinion. Even while the debate over the ethics of a newspaper 'selling news' was hotting up into a regular war of words between two of the country's top-selling English dailies, journalism was dealt another stunning blow. Last week, the Mumbai police arrested Rishi Chopra of The Economic Times along with an accomplice (a former journalist with another business daily) in an alleged extortion attempt. The duo was trapped accepting a Rs 700,000 bribe which was the second installment of a Rs 2.5 million payoff to kill a report about the shenanigans of one Poonamchand Malu of Malu Financial Services. Worse, the pay-off itself had apparently been haggled down from an initial demand of Rs 10 million to Rs 2.5 million. Although corruption in the media is no longer news, the actual arrest of two scribes and the sums involved, marked a new low in this once honourable profession”. There! That’s an extract from a report by Sucheta Dalal titled “Selling news or buying silence?” in March 2003. Do read the whole article, it truly exposes pathetic journalistic practices of Arnab’s group. Have these practices ended? Let Arnab verify and confirm they have.

In the post “India’s Biggest Mafia” I had written: "Look deep into our media.You will find extortion, blackmail, murder, connections with anti-national elements, black money. Everything you can associate with a regular mafia you will find in equal measure in the media too. But since they claim to be ‘God’s own messengers’ they will never expose their own mafia". Blackmailing is just a small part of our media’s operations even if Arnab finds it amusing.

To Kapil Sibal, With Love - Deep Throat

In a couple of days from now (on December 15) Kapil Sibal is scheduled to hold a round-table conference with Internet giants Google, Facebook, Microsoft and maybe some more. Let’s just call these companies ISPs. Sibal’s stated purpose is have these companies develop new guidelines that will keep obscene and abusive content off the internet. He also has problems with such content being posted by anonymous people. CNN-IBN and NDTV through their interviews with the minister have helped defend his actions and deny that he had called for “pre-screening” of content, although the whole world is now quite clear that what he attempted was a grand scheme of ‘political censorship’ mainly to protect Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi from being criticised or made fun of on the net.

KaranThapar’s ‘massage’ can be read here at the CNN-IBN site. Like I mentioned in my previous post the Indian media had blacked out news of various meetings Sibal had with the ISPs and it took the NYT to ‘leak’ the news. Karan Thapar even went to the extent of asking Sibal if NYT was “getting at him”! Getting at him? Getting at him for what? Here, a journalist is implying that there might be motives for the NYT article even when Sibal himself hadn’t suggested it. That’s Indian media for you. Here’s the answer for Karan Thapar: Reporting news of devious plans of the govt. is called “news reporting” and reporting it is the only motive. There need not be other motives to report news as may be the case for some Indian media outlets and journalists. Heather Timmons who broke the news in NYT seems to have jokingly told Sibal's office they were just keeping them on their toes.Well, that's what media is supposed to do, unlike CNN-IBN which searches for "motives". Thapar further asks if NYT confirmed the story with Sibal before publishing. That is truly the height of stupidity by Thapar. Are newspapers supposed to confirm stories with wrong doers when they might have “reliable sources”? Haven’t the greatest stories come from “reliable sources”? Importantly, nowhere in the whole interview with Thapar does Sibal deny or refute the story of NYT. To top it all Kapil Sibal responded stating he doesn’t want to attribute motives but the “circumstantial evidence” is clear. Aha! Circumstantial evidence that Sibal was about to commit a major offence was pretty much exposed.

 

Here’s another exchange:

Karan Thapar: Let's then come back to what you say was your central focus, blasphemous and offensive content on these Internet platforms. When did you first raise this issue with the Internet platform?

Kapil Sibal: Way back on the September 5 we raised this issue and we circulated some of the content that was blasphemous, that you mentioned, and demeaning. They agreed with it and we said let’s start a dialogue and come back to us within four weeks.

Needless to mention, Sibal had started out this venture by showing off dirty pictures of Sonia Gandhi to the ISP heads and had then turned it around to dangers of “communal violence” owing to content on the net. Laughable! There is an important term Sibal uses for which it would be even fair to hang him. He says he circulated content that was “blasphemous”! Blasphemous? Against whom or against what religion? India does not have a blasphemy law so how in the world does Sibal make such statements. Is this some Islamic country? People may be killed in Pakistan and other Islamic countries but India definitely does not have blasphemy laws. This is what the honourable minister would like to bring into India?

Then again, Sibal has a problem with ‘Anonymity’ on the internet for the objectionable content that he cites. Okay! On the night of June 4 thousands of innocent protesters were assaulted by the police at the Ramlila grounds in Delhi. These were not anonymous rodents. These were humans in flesh and blood. The protesters were neither violent nor threatened violence. Will Sibal answer why these dissenting voices were dealt with so violently? Karan Thapar did not ask him that question. This Congress govt simply wants to shut out any kind of dissent. The attack on Ramlila crowd resulted in the death of an innocent woman. Did any head roll for it? What happened at Ramlila is symbolic of a govt that wants to shut out dissent everywhere. It is not pornography or obscenity that really bothers Kapil Sibal. The fact that people are angry and trashing this govt and their secretive Gandhis on the net does bother him.

Following the exposure of Sibal’s grand scheme to shut off dissent Outlook magazine published many of the pics that have floated on the net for quite a while. There might be more. If you look closely, these pics are humorous and funny rather than offensive. Sure, one might say some are in ‘bad taste’ but surely, bad taste is neither illegal nor punishable. The one pic that Outlook missed was “BhrashtAchar” (Referring to Corruption by politicians with Sonia Gandhi’s image) and that humorously conveys the corruption that has so become synonymous with the Congress. And usually such pics and content generally fade away after a few laughs but Sibal has made sure these will be saved and circulated a lot more than before. Such is the stupidity of his action. As far as anonymity goes there is a brilliant post by RealityCheck India, titled “Thank you Google” which completely destroys the premise on which Sibal partly makes his arguments.

Sibal then talks about child pornography being a serious problem on the net. I dare him to name even one ISP he met which allows child pornography. Every ISP has strict rules and guidelines against child pornography and does not allow such content. If they come across such content the user is permanently banned. Even regular adult content comes with a warning of the content being so. So Sibal doesn’t really fool anyone. Even so, in the US pedophilia is not a free speech issue. In fact, Amazon.com was selling a book titled "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover's Code of Conduct". This was withdrawn due to consumer protest and not because it broke any law. So Sibal must rest assured people have a better sense of the limits and what to reject.

Finally, on the issue of porn and anonymity let me assure Sibal that even porn stars mostly carry screen names and not their real names. Believe it or not, the title of the first commercially successful feature porn film in the USA was also involved in a way in bringing down Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. The deep source from the FBI that fed important leaks to Bob Woodward was nicknamed “Deep Throat” by one of his group editors as he was a deep source and at the time the porn movie of the same name was commercially doing well. For over three decades that anonymous source was the greatest secret in the world. It’s only the late W. Mark Felt, former Deputy Director of FBI himself revealed that he was deep throat. Have a laugh Mr. Sibal, there might be deep throats in the Congress who are leaking information to the NYT and other journals. As for the Congress, trying to silence the Internet won’t help. Honest governance might help!