Falling Down: Journalism in an age when everything is for sale
This is an old Book Chaat column that first appeared on Rediff.com.
BOOK CHAAT
by Ashok Banker
It Takes Balls
Fallen Heroes is the first of a new breed of non-fiction that’s here to say, feels Ashok Banker
FALLEN HEROES
497 pages
Paperback
Buffalo Books/tehelka.com
Rs 350
They say there are only two kinds of news – bad and very bad.
To phrase that in today’s newspeak, you could say there are only two kinds of news articles — sensational pieces and sexational pieces.
The news that makes news in our info-overloaded world has to be shocking enough to make us sit up and take notice, or sexy enough to make us look twice.
This doesn’t mean that good news about good people can’t sell – it simply means that it’s easier and more lucrative to package and sell what most people want most of the time.
Advertising, the second-oldest profession, learned this formula a long, long time ago.
Sadly but profitably, journalism has learned from it in more recent times.
And most sadly of all, the Indian media has begun to depend almost exclusively on this easy and sleazy formula.
But once in a while, a few good women and men are able to take the formula and squeeze something good out of it.
To tell a news story that satisfies all the marketing requirements yet achieves something worthwhile in the process.
Like a corrupt politician who occasionally contributes fat cheques to deserving charities, the Indian media sometimes throws up a story that actually changes our lives.
I don’t know if the exposure of the cricketing scam qualifies for this praiseworthy position.
Frankly, I never thought that sports stars were heroes, and so I don’t see them as villains now.
But to those who did make that foolish error, it must be quite a heart-breaker to see their alleged heroes exposed as frail corrupt mortals.
The first Indian publication to take up the controversy boldly and bravely was Outlook, of course.
That now-legendary cover story about Manoj Prabhakar’s allegations is an important part of journalism history now.
It played a crucial role in establishing the fledgeling newsweekly, and exposed the reigning superstar India Today as a complacent dinosaur.
In a sense, the Outlook cricketing investigation, like its Kargil exposes, changed more than sports reporting or cricket history.
It changed the face of Indian journalism and non-fiction writing itself.
While the West has always had a free and flourishing industry in outspoken non-fiction, these kind of investigations are relatively new to us here.
The team at Outlook that was responsible for the sensational stories moved on to another venture.
A web portal called tehelka.com.
So far so good.
But when they moved, they also took their news stories with them! So both the cricketing controversy and the Kargil controversy got a new lease of life on the web portal.
What was most interesting about this whole exercise was that the stories didn’t really change much in its new avatar.
What changed was the packaging.
Editor Tarun Tejpal, Associate Editor Shoma Chatterjee, reporter Aniruddha Bahal, and the rest of the Outlook/tehelka.com team didn’t really rake up mountains of new facts.
Instead, they packaged the old facts in innovative new ways.
One was the now-notorious “Prabhakar tapes”.
Taking a page, several pages in fact, from American television reporting, the tehelka team managed to get several key players or observers in the whole cricket scam on a secret spycam and discuss the matter.
It wasn’t so much that the interviews revealed everything.
It was the very fact that these people had agreed to discuss the issue at all that gave it legitimacy.
Similarly, the book compiling the transcripts of those interviews and the rest of the whole coverage, adds another level of legitimacy to the scoop.
Today, with the CBI report tabled and most of its key facts revealed in the daily headlines, cricketers arrested or banned, icons falling by the wayside, it’s difficult not to be impressed by tehelka.com’s achievement.
If nothing else, they’ve certainly lived up to their name at least: “tehelka machcha diya”!
But what did they really achieve besides that?
Sure, so the book Fallen Heroes makes interesting, even gripping reading.
It’s the most fascinating collection of transcript since the Monica Lewinsky or O J Simpson trials – even though there’s neither sex nor murder involved here!
But has it done what some of the illustrious names quoted on the book claim it has done:
“…restored to Indian journalism its lost glory…” (Pritish Nandy).
Brought about “…a giant leap forward in investigative journalism” (Shyam Benegal).
Offered a “brilliant documentary” (Mid-day).
Or even showed the “true face of Indian cricket to the public” (KPS Gill).
Only time will tell.
Meanwhile, I’m willing to acknowledge tehelka’s achievement in one major area.
They’ve certainly proved that in today’s media-mad age, bad news sells beautifully.
And slick packaging justifies a fat premium on the price.
And most of all, that journalism is at its best when raking muck.
Is that because it’s the only thing journalism does really well (destroying being so much easier than creation)?
Or because we have so much muck that needs raking in our world?
Either way, I have a feeling that Fallen Heroes is a genre of book that we’ll see much more of in the months and years to come.
I’m still waiting for one good book that does for the Kargil cover-up what Fallen Heroes does to cricket match-fixing.
I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually, it’s tehelka who brings out that one as well.
But I wouldn’t bet on it.
