Whether or not this attempt is successful, both print and television media have covered the so-called scam with shameful inaccuracy.
The reporting on claims that AAP received large donations from dubious companies that were fronts for money laundering is only the latest example of irresponsible media coverage of political corruption.
The mere use of the words “hawala” and “money laundering” in this case borders on yellow journalism. Even the Bharatiya Janata Party – which compelled three senior ministers, Arun Jaitley, Piyush Goyal and Nirmala Sitharaman, to recuse themselves from the affairs of state in favour of attacking Arvind Kejriwal – has not accused the politician or his party of committing any illegality. Neither the BJP nor the Congress dispute Kejriwal’s assertion that the donations in question were received by cheque.
Any suggestion of illegality is restricted to the four companies that made the donations. Nirmala Sitharaman may have rhetorically referred to Keriwal as a chor, but she has declined either to accuse him of a specific crime or to call for an investigation (only AAP itself has done the latter). No evidence has been offered either by AVAM, the group that made the allegations, or by the BJP to support their claims that AAP is guilty of hawala transactions or money laundering.
None of this is to downplay the seriousness of AAP receiving large donations of highly dubious provenance. From its inception, the party has employed a tone of relentless sanctimony, and it is not enough to say that the BJP and Congress have no credibility on the question of political funding. AAP deserves to be held to a higher standard of probity. But its failings in this case appear to be moral, not legal. It is guilty of negligence and perhaps of hypocrisy, but not – at least on all the evidence presented – of hawala or money laundering.
Contrary to the allegation made by some AAP supporters, the sensationalist media coverage does not reflect an anti-AAP bias. Network 18 aside, there is no such systematic bias in the English-language media. Indeed, AAP owes its rise more than any other party to the quantity and nature of its media coverage, testament to the media’s fixation with Delhi. It is, rather, sadly representative of the way in which allegations of corruption have been reported in recent years.
The classic case of dangerously misleading media coverage is the 2G scam. The mere fact that this was almost universally reported, especially in headlines, as the “1.76 lakh crore 2G scam” gave the impression that A Raja and the United Progressive Alliance government had pocketed that sum of money. The alleged loss was notional and the method of allocation was a policy endorsed by both the National Democratic Alliance and the UPA. But these facts were presented as the flimsy defence of criminals whose guilt was beyond question.
The media’s promotion of the 1.76 lakh crore figure gave rise to the popular image of the UPA as a government not merely corrupt but uniquely corrupt. The 2G scam had a direct influence on the 2011 assembly elections in Tamil Nadu and, more indirectly, on the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry into the allocation did raise serious questions of crony capitalism.
But coupled with its veneration of former Comptroller and Attorney General Vinod Rai, a man who exposed no criminality, as the voice of honesty, the media’s use of the 1.76 lakh crore figure seriously misconstrued the nature and scope of the so-called scam with far-reaching political consequences.
There are at least three factors driving inaccurate or exaggerated coverage of corruption. The first is the rise of he-said she-said journalism at the expense of reporting and, in particular, of genuine investigative journalism. In both the 2G and AAP cases, the media were guilty of uncritically reporting allegations made by groups that lacked credibility, and in particular of adopting language and figures – “hawala”, “1.76 lakh crore” – that made for good headlines but were unsupported by fact.
This in keeping with a wider trend, particularly prevalent in television news, of allowing politicians to throw mud at opponents without having their accusations fact-checked or even questioned by journalists. The return from political obscurity of Subramanian Swamy – who not coincidentally is currently fighting to decriminalise libel in India – embodies this new climate of fact-free accusation.
The second factor is simply that scams are good for circulation and TV ratings, not to mention Twitter trends. No political issue unites the English-language audience as much as political corruption, and if allegations of corruption are simultaneously exaggerated and reported as fact, they circulate all the quicker. As the British Prime Minister James Callaghan once ruefully remarked, “A lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.” Nowhere is this truer than in India.
Finally, the media reports allegations of corruption in much the same way as it reports other kinds of crime, most notably rape and murder – reserving for itself the role of both prosecution and judge, and operating under the principle of guilty until proven innocent. This is, in part, a response to the perception that the CBI is no more than a tool of the government of the day, and the failure of the courts to speedily or effectively punish corruption.
The two prominent politicians jailed for corruption in recent years, Jayalithaa and Laloo Prasad Yadav, were convicted after 18 and 17 years respectively. In this climate, the public are more than happy to allow the press and television to determine matters of guilt or innocence.
We thus have a tragic situation in which the area in which the media is most capable of serving the public interest – by exposing the wrongdoings of elected representatives – is an area where journalists are actually causing sustained harm to Indian democracy. Manchester Guardian editor C.P. Scott’s dictum that “comment is free, but facts are sacred” was once the most famous expression of journalistic ethics. When it comes to the coverage of corruption, however, comment is free, but facts are boring.
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