Now, how’ll you get the news?

For many of us brought up on a steady diet of Bollywood drama, there is a preconceived image of a judicial court. And like every other thing from our lover-of-the-melodrama movieland, the image is grossly misleading. That’s why, when I walked into one for the first time as a court reporter, it looked like any other sarkari office to me. Apart from a raised platform for the judge to sit, and some don’t even have those, they just have clusters of tables scattered around. When a hearing is on, you find everyone crowding around the judge with no way to distinguish between the accused, the prosecutors and the rest. So when a former colleague told us the story about his first time, we bought it even though it sound pretty incredible. According to the legend, he walked into a room which only had a couple of people around. He went up to the nearest table and said, “Dude, can you tell me what’s happening?” Yes, he actually used the word ‘dude’ for an official conversation at the Tis Hazari Court Complex. “Can you tell me where the judge is? Where can I get a copy of the orders?” The ‘dude’ looked at him contemptuously and said: “I am the judge.”

The reason I recount this anecdote is the Supreme Court ruling on media reporting this week in a case between Sahara group and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). The origin of the ruling was that some TV reporter had managed to get details of classified communication between the two parties and had broadcast them, which Sahara claimed affected their business interests. That one case has now led to an order that’s threatening to change the very way we work, the way we report, and the way audiences learn about what’s happening around them. Thanks to the apex court’s order which we are reassuringly told is only “preventive and not punitive” in nature, ‘dude’ reporters like my former colleague may not be able to venture into all courtrooms like the ones who’ve got a postponement order in place. Chief Justice SH Kapadia probably had my somewhat ignorant friend in mind when he and others on the constitutional bench deliberated and wrote this doctrine, the problem is that others who are informed and have tracked legal cases throughout their careers, may also be blocked out.

As a reporter, I don’t just have a problem with the repercussions of this judgment, but also the entire basis for this case. It all stems from one reporter getting an exclusive story which dismays the judges. They exclaim how “proposals sent by learned counsel for the appellants to the learned counsel for SEBI has come on one of the TV channels. Such incidents are increasing by the day. Such reporting not only affects the business sentiments but also interferes in the administration of justice.”

Is it so wrong for a reporter to score an exclusive story? The story may have affected the share value of the company but the reporter could be blamed only if the story they reported was factually incorrect which ostensibly it wasn’t. It’s a bit like a CBI officer telling us very early on in the 2G case that we shouldn’t report the details of the corporate giants being called for questioning. “It’ll have a major impact on our nation’s economy,” he warned. I am as patriotic as the next person, but didn’t I have a responsibility to dig and report the truth, first?

I’m not saying every story that the media covers upholds these noble values. We all know the offenders amidst us — the ones who while covering the Aarushi murder case, tried to flush a khukri down the toilet on camera to show whether it was possible at all to dispose of a murder weapon. That reporter didn’t care whether the CBI had conclusively decided that the khukri was the murder weapon or not, but just wanted to do a bad impression of Sherlock Holmes for TV. There was another reporter who while we were covering the Nithari murder case which involved cannibalistic behaviour, decided to freely embellish the details. He described how after butchering human flesh, the accused, Surendra Kohli, was using a pressure cooker and waiting for precisely two whistles to devour it. I can safely say that even in the most unofficial of briefings, no CBI investigator could have dreamt up such details but it should be the job of the Editor’s Guild and Broadcasters Association to deal with this, and not the courts. The court dealing with the Aarushi case is now out of bounds for media, which may explain why you are now getting confused, second-hand information about what’s happening in that tragic case.

As I write this column, I’m told many of these high profile 2G accused industrialists are hoping to get a postponement order on publication in the case and they are waiting to approach the high court. Here’s how a young lawyer explained the impact to me: “Any politician facing trial will try and get a postponement order and some will succeed. That means media will not be able to report till there is a final judgment in the case.” She said, “So all they have to do is keep delaying the final order and there are means to do that, and there will be no adverse publicity, and he’ll keep winning elections.” Other legal experts may disagree with her saying it’s too extreme and postponement will be rare, but even if this happens only in 0.1 percent of cases — Is that acceptable to us?

Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News
On Twitter: @sunetrac