The media is almost the last to report on corruption

You media people…” when a close friend began a sentence like that and assailed journalists for focusing on scam after scam, it gave me pause.

This was especially so because the speaker is a non-political industrialist, not given to analysis of the media. His irritation started with the Commonwealth Games muddle and continued through the 2G scam, the Radia tapes and so on. “Don’t you guys ever find anything good to report?”

One wouldn’t give this so much importance if it were an isolated view. It isn’t. You hear statements like this expressed every other day. Readers of newspapers and viewers of TV news are fed up of the corruption in the country, that’s for sure. But they also want to shoot the messenger.

My view is that the media isn’t giving corruption enough importance. Look at the 2G scam. It hit the headlines big time only when the CAG report came out with a massive figure of loss to the exchequer.

Shouldn’t the media have been pursuing the case earlier, from the time A Raja fixed the first-come, first-served process? The CAG report then would only have been additional ammunition.

Other scandals like corruption in the Allahabad high court have not been revealed by the media; in this particular case, it is the Supreme Court itself which has brought it in the news.

The Adarsh building got sanctioned, constructed and occupied without the media sniffing anything rotten in it; it was only when an internal letter from a senior naval officer got leaked that the media got hold of the story. Then again, what about the depredations of the Reddy brothers? The land scam in Karnataka? Has the media been leading the investigations or living off scraps of information from political parties?

A recent case of corruption highlights the passive role the media generally plays in most such cases.

This relates to former UP chief secretary Neera Yadav and Flex Industries chairman Ashok Chaturvedi in a multi-crore land scam. The story was carried everywhere last week when a special CBI court sentenced both of them to four years’ imprisonment.

Now here are some interesting details. Yadav is a 1971 batch IAS officer. The UP IAS officers’ association, in its annual secret ballot to name the state’s most corrupt officers, put Neera Yadav at No 2 in 1995.

Yet she was promoted to the chief secretary’s post by Mulayam Singh Yadav in 2005. When Mayawati took over from Mulayam Singh, she retained Neera as chief secretary.

The Noida plot scam in which Yadav has been named was neither unearthed nor followed-up by the media.

It was the Supreme Court that directed the CBI to start an inquiry. This was as far back as 1998. Even the CBI’s charge-sheets are seven years old. Yet there was no hint in the media all these years. And Neera was hardly being discreet.

She owns bungalows in Noida, Delhi, Ghaziabad, Mumbai and Bangalore. She even owns a bungalow in Glasgow, Scotland! Her net worth is said to be  about Rs500 crore!

There is more: the CBI director wrote to UP governor Umesh Bhandari Singh about immovable property worth crores that Neera had acquired as CEO of NOIDA Authority.

An earlier CBI director too had asked the governor’s permission to inquire into her land allotments and private assets. But the sanctions never came.

The UP government wrote to the Centre that there was no need for any action at all.

Obviously, political games were being played and if both Mulayam Singh and Mayawati promoted and retained a known corrupt person in the highest administrative post in the state, it was because it suited them. The point is that the media does not need the governor’s sanction to proceed with an investigation.

Neither does the media need the government’s approval to expose the corrupt. But it didn’t do any such thing.
There is news now of the foodgrain scam in UP which is believed to be big, really big.

Estimates of its size range from Rs35,000 crore to Rs2,00,000 crore, which would make it bigger than even the 2G scam. It is said to spread over five countries and involves half the districts in UP and over 1,200 class I and other officials.

The scam has been going on for nearly 10 years — siphoning off grain meant for the poor in schemes like the public distribution system, the mid-day meal schemes for children and several schemes meant for those below the poverty line.

The grain was sold off to private retailers while showing it in the books as being distributed. This is being reported only now because the case has come up in the Lucknow high court. asking for the court’s intervention in getting the case investigated. What did the media do all these years?

Of late, there has been a lot of back-patting by the media for uncovering this scam or the other. In truth, the media uncovers nothing of real note. It only reports corruption when it comes out in the open through other’s intervention. That is why the corrupt are still corrupt. They are afraid of no one. Least of all the media.