A SCANDALOUS MEDIA TRIAL

Indian news channels (except maybe for NDTV24X7 & CNN-IBN) are a disgrace to journalism.

Aaj Tak keeps spending ad money to proclaim how many awards it has won and since it is in Hindi I don’t watch it much. However I did think it would be decent because, quite simply, the others in the vernacular category can, at best, be described as Tabloid. Nothing journalistic about them in anyway.

However recently, I managed to catch Aaj Tak on TV and to my horror the reportage on the Arushi murder case felt like a TV soap from Ekta Kapoor gone horrible wrong. It was filled with images of the poor girl swimming in and out of the frame and inter-cut with shots of the other ‘accused’ and horror of horrors, also with a song from Tare Zameen Par called "Tujhe Sab kuch Pata hai Maa" playing in the background.
Awards alone don’t seem to make anything respectable anymore.

And some child protection agency intervened on time or else we are also going to be subjected to a serial based on this (still unraveling) case.

Not that the Media is alone to be blamed.

It began with the UP police (who incidentally still haven’t managed to prosecute the accused in the horrible Nithari rape/sodomy/beheading/cannibalism of almost 30+ children) who began their bizarrely premature press conference with innuendo and half truths. The police version of what happened that evening was an absolute fabrication where they accused the poor girl of being caught by her father in a “objectionable but not compromising position” with the domestic help Hemraj, after which the father alleged killed her and then led the servant to the terrace to kill him there. The throats was cut with a sharp “surgical like” instrument, they helpfully added. With both parents being Doctors it wasn’t difficult to see where this was heading.

Ofcourse with the poor girl and Hemraj dead, and the only other person present there (the father Dr. Rajesh Talwar) not having confessed, the question was how did the police reach that conclusion?
The media however were too busy wiping the drool from their lips to even bother with such questions.

Then to make matters worse, the police (An IGP no less) began to leak SMS messages from her mobile as well as numbers of the boys in her school who she spoke to frequently. There was no motive behind this selective leak except to paint the poor dead girl as some kind of decadent slut.

Again the media did not question any of this and infact picked up the ‘story’ and ran gleeful stories with some channels even producing re-enactments of the sms exchange, complete with ‘actors’ hamming their way through the parts.

Obviously not satisfied with this blatant lying, the blitz of media attention led to further insinuations from the attention crazy police force.

They went further to suggest that a family friend was Dr. Talwar’s mistress. That the two worked together was the alleged proof. The daughter, the police said, did not like the affair and thus was killed by the father to hide the affair. There even a hint of wife swapping.

The IGP obviously not satisfied with lurid speculation, slander, professional ethics then went on to conclude the press conference by saying that in his view the father was “as characterless as the daughter”.

Each and every one of these allegations have been proved with time to be absolutely false yet no action has been taken. No apologies tendered. By either the police or the media.

Then the CBI took over the case and everyone watching breathed a collective sigh of relief.

A few weeks later a ‘compouder’ was arrested and subjected to lie detector and narco tests. Still nothing.

A few days ago another servant, Raj Kumar, was arrested. The CBI said he would show them where the murder weapon was and that he was the one to destroy Arushi’s mobile.

Still Nothing.

More Narco tests are being done and meanwhile the TV “News” channels are providing more ‘updates’ with even more bizarrely placed background songs.

There has to be some kind of a line between voyeurism, sensationalism, character assassination and a genuine public scrutiny. But this is difficult in an age where news has become entertainment. But who will bell the media cat?

Zee News (and I use the word very lightly here) however, took the cake ….

When Raj Kumar was being taken into custody they had a 5 second footage of him being led away which they played in a never ending loop and in slow motion with a song playing in the background…..

And guess which song it was??

Khallas from Company.

What is the connection?

GO figure....

Till next time

Ciao from me.

V