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.
