Aarushi: Her killer's is a lesser crime than sleaze-starved Indian media's

This is with reference to an article by Mr. Manoj Mitta in The Times of India on August 8, 2010, headlined ‘Aarushi coverage reignites debate on media coverage’. This is the link to that article: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Aarushi-coverage-reignites-debate-on-media-restraint/articleshow/6273245.cms


Dear Manoj Mitta,
How easy for you to say that in the Arushi murder investigation case, the ‘real’ culprit is the CBI?
Just as the person who gives a bribe is as much a culprit as the one asking for it, the media is a ‘real’ culprit too.
Take your own paper, TOI, for instance. Why didn’t you or any one else report the grounds on which the supreme court issued notices to TOI along with two others?
Was it self-preservation or self-censorship? I can understand the journalists today need to survive first in order to cry from the pulpit. But surely self-restraint could have been observed by TOI when reporting about the case in the first place?
What can I say about the journalistic sobriety and corporate responsibility of a paper as TOI which can do anything to earn a penny. Remember, how TOI once sold its own mast head as advertising space? For that matter, it was a tough experience opening the link to your article in the TOI as I had to negotiate links to marriage and advertisement sites popping up endlessly before I could read what you wrote on such a serious issue.
You should go through the TOI archives to see how precipitously anti-Arushi its coverage was from day one.
The larger issue is the media, in India, today is a self-server. Nothing else. Had Arushi belonged to a poor family living in a slum, the reputable TOI wouldn’t even have bothered to covered the original crime in the first place. This is true for each and every publication and broadcaster who claims to undergo a journalistic routine in this country.
The Supreme Court correctly described the media as ‘irresponsible press’. Only the court waited thus far to say it. We have heard of the Indian courts suo moto trying to restrain excesses of various kinds in the past. What happened to the courts in Arushi’s case? Weren’t the judges reading the papers? Or did they realise that the late Arushi’s reputation had been tarnished by the media only after her father went to the court?
When the Arushi story broke all those years ago, I had the opportunity to talk to most print and TV journalists covering the case. Initially the novices – the bite carriers – were sent out to do the story. The talk, in newsrooms and the Press club, essentially was around who among the girl and her parents was sleeping with whom. But once the big bosses realised the story’s potential, and their own scope for self-doodling in signed columns or on live television, they took over. Bereft as they are all, without exception, of common sense and without a modicum of shame, they spilt their guts out, trying to stereotype Arushi as nothing less than a hooker. They made out their parents to be nothing short of night-time Romeos and Juliets.
I will not condescend to even talk about what the NOIDA police or the CBI did, beneath contempt as they truly are. Or, for that matter, Renuka Chowdhry, the then minister who shed crocodile tears and thus gained media mileage of her own by brandishing the press as sensationalist. Did she even go to Arushi’s house even once? What with her being a woman, a wife, a mother and all? Pooh.
The bile comes up when I see and read so-called senior journalists sitting in arm chairs in air-conditioned cubicles talk of human rights and individual privacy and media ethics and what not when in fact they are nothing but insensitive lackeys of media profiteers.
Let Arushi rest in peace. As Indian journalists that is the least the lot can do for her after all that it has already done. And next time when any of you are called on to the stage to accept an award for courageous,distinguished, human or social journalism, try to run away as far as possible. If not, I know none of you wouldn’t, at least cover your face while accepting such awards.
I remember a journalist, a cut-throat one at that, who would go out to tarnish women complaining of rape. One day, his own niece was raped. And I saw him – this now helpless hack – in tears calling up fellow hacks in other papers to condemn the rape and importantly, not to mention the name of his niece as that would spoil her future. I don’t know how the fellow hacks responded to his please, but I, with a hand over my heart, can say I took the opportunity to tell him without mincing words that he was reaping what he himself had sown, notwithstanding all my sympathies for his niece.
I know that journalists won’t change. Until it happens to them. Not that I wish it. But I can’t stop Arushi’s family from wanting to. Or, those hundreds and thousands of nameless, faceless Indians who are daily victims of the mighty pen-pushers.
Manoj, don’t take it personally. I know you as one of the most honest and sensitive of journalists I have come across. But then, even God makes mistakes sometimes.
What about me when I was a journalist, you or anyone can ask. I quit the shit when I found myself a lone voice. I didn’t care for the money or the position. Not a society-changing act, but better than the rest, I believe.