How does it feel, Justice Katju?

For people who spend their lives analysing, dissecting, and criticising other people, journalists sure seem to have a pretty thin skin.

This past week, you might have noticed some very agitated journalists sputtering on air and threatening to break their keyboards as they typed out angry editorials against the new Press Council of India chief Justice Markandey Katju.

All this because Justice Katju, as soon as he took over, decided to give a TV interview and declare that we media people were of a ‘very poor intellectual level.’

I know that these words sound harsh to those journalists who have worked very hard to attain a high cerebral status.

Those that have got doctorates from Ivy League schools, won scholarships to Oxbridge, studied at the IITs and the IIMs and chose journalism to channel their intellect to further the cause of their country, to do the fourth estate proud.

They are the ones who would savour Justice Katju’s references to Rousseau, Thomas Paine and Diderot and would be hurt when he proclaims that presswallahs have no knowledge of economic theory or political science or literature or philosophy.

But do we really need to prove our intellectual prowess to be a good journalist? They didn’t teach me all that much in my post-graduate journalism school but we did have a teacher of news reporting who we all looked up to because he seemed to be the only one who’d had a pretty successful career before giving it up to teach newbies like us. He was doing a post-mortem of the stories we’d filed and when one enthusiastic kid peppered his article with too many big words, he said: ‘Never write anything a class 8 student cannot understand. If you do, you are just writing to impress your peers,’ he said, ‘which many newspaper writers do.’

And that’s what I and other reporters tried to follow. Of course, since I was just a bachelor of arts in literature from the Delhi University, I didn’t have to work too hard to hide my vocabulary or reach out to the matric-failed masses. But as reporters, many of us revel in the role of generalists. We take our average intelligence to all kinds of places. From police stations manned by post-graduates, to district courts with tout lawyers and their fake degrees, to villages where they speak several languages but cannot write, to universities with wise men and women, and high offices like Parliament, where we track the intricacies of lawmaking.

While reporting on such varied topics, there are times we wish we’d done a law degree, or read a few more books of history or politics and at least a couple on economic theory but then it seems that a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to gain expertise in all the fields that we have to delve into. Which is where the beauty of our training comes in — we are not afraid to ask the most basic of questions. We are paid to speak to the experts and get the answers for the people. So when I speak about the extremely technical 2G spectrum scam case, I don’t claim to be the CBI stepney officer cracking the case. I just make sure I speak to investigators, prosecutors, lawyers, distil their points of view and then try and present it on TV in a coherent fashion (Am sorry, Prof Kaul, I don’t think my best efforts will make a class 8 student understand the 2G case.)

And yes, because most people like their newspapers and TV channels to have fresh news, to have the news of the day, we do try and speed things up. So we do irritating things like landing up at JNU professors’ homes and asking them before their Sunday nap just why it is that their latest research paper has caused so much heartburn? We try and round up their critics, because the Press Council’s ethics and all other journalistic standards say we must get the other side, even if they are a bunch of loonies. We know that some would take offence and call us idiots because when they ask us to first read their 500-page academic paper instead of telling us in simple language, we have to tell them we haven’t the time. But seriously, we haven’t the time! Because, if we miss our story or don’t represent all sides within our deadline, a 100 fingers will rise and call us motivated or say it’s paid news.

So, I really hope Justice Katju spends some time to get to know us a little better.

The Indian media can be ‘obnoxious’, and we do love to ask stupid questions like, ‘How does it feel?’ but he can’t call us ‘anti-people’ like he does in that interview. It’s all done to give the people what they want.

Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/ reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News