The person happiest at the turn of events in the Uma Khurana sting incident will be Union information and broadcasting minister Priya Ranjan Das Munshi. This will give him an excuse to roll out his broadcast code to strangle sting operations, and if he can, push it down the unwilling throats of television channels.

Of course, all channels must have been embarrassed by what happened. The sting that led to mob violence in Delhi and Uma Khurana's dismissal, was nothing but a set-up, where the journalist had been paid to conduct the sting by someone who wanted to settle scores with Khurana. Its initial impact was so huge that the poor school teacher would have been lynched had the police not taken her into custody. Even the school where she was teaching was not spared public wrath. Other TV channels followed up the incident by setting up discussion forums on how bad teachers were and how they were exploiting their students. Parents were asked whether they feared sending their daughters to schools etc.

The police has now let the teacher go and has arrested the sting operators. The teacher might even get back her job. However, no compensation would be enough for the agony and shame she suffered for no fault of hers. Her life has virtually been ruined.

Those who have been questioning both the ethics and the relevance of sting operation as a tool of journalism have been told that it serves public interest by exposing wrongdoing at various levels. Would we have known that some MPs take money for asking questions in Parliament if a sting operation had not exposed some of them? But for an NDTV sting, would we have known that defence and prosecution counsels colluded to buy a witness to provide an escape hatch to the accused in the BMW case? Would we have known how defence officers could be bought by supplying them with call girls if the Tehelka sting had not taken place? Or that policemen on Delhi local trains ask for bribes? The list is sickeningly long.

One may ask the difference between filching confidential documents to expose an act of wrongdoing and mounting a sting operation to capture in graphic detail the bribing of a public servant. The courts have not objected to the use of sting in the BMW case, and have considered its result. The lawyers' self-regulatory authority has taken action against the two legal luminaries exposed in the case. In some other sting episodes, the courts have gone into details of the operations and have even got the tapes examined for possible manipulation. This, in effect, establishes the legality of the hidden camera as a tool. The court's acceptance of the tapes as evidence condones the operators who made a false representation to the person against whom the operation was carried out.

However, sting as a tool of journalism has a questionable standing. For one, it is similar to a trap that the police lays to catch a criminal. The police is authorised by law to do this. It is accountable to the government if it misuses this tool. Not so a person using the hidden camera to record an event to apparently expose a wrongdoing. For one thing, the person may not even be a journalist; the hidden camera as a tool is available to anyone. And this means that anyone can use it for purposes other than the exposure of wrongdoing to serve public interest.

Only the other day, three persons were caught for using a hidden camera to blackmail an MP. The potential victim was alert enough and clever enough to detect the impostors. But that need not be the case in general. In most sting operations, the kingpin is an impostor, though he can claim that he has been posing for public good. As the Delhi incidents showed, in one case the reporter who was claiming to mount a sting operation was actually letting himself become a tool in a criminal's hands; in the other incident, the sting operators were criminals.

A sting operation can thus border on criminal activity, though it can also be a tool to serve public purpose at times, if you accept that the next thing is to invite outside interference in the journalist's work. Moreover, it is very difficult to follow some sort of a self-regulation when the TV channels are competing with each other. To entrust TV journalism with the double-edged sword of the hidden camera can thus be self-destructive. Two or more such incidents, and there will be a public outcry that these channels need to be disciplined by an outside agency. And governments, the first victims of television's news power, will be only too glad to clamp down on both news and views.

So journalists' organisations must come forward now to evaluate whether stings are a legitimate tool of their trade. Good journalism can expose public authorities' wrongdoing without having to filch documents or without stepping on the toes of law. Informants do provide insights into the happenings behind the closed doors of power. The role of the "Deep Throat" in the Watergate case was something that will be written in golden letters in the history of journalism. In our country, the Bofors exposés come in this category.

The journalist is not a policeman. His entire "authority" flows from the social good that his profession does. In good journalistic organisations, print or electronic, there ought to be adequate control mechanisms in place against possible misuse of the reporters' access to sources of power. Besides, there is a basic difference between the quality of print exposés and those by television, due to the differences in the nature of the technology used. TV channels only air an episode; they cannot balance it with analysis and the larger picture within which the episode takes place, because time is their limiting factor. The impact of TV exposés may be huge, but it can be instantaneous and beyond the control of the media as it happened in the Uma Khurana case leading to a riot-like situation. Neither is sting good journalism, nor a safe tool for a journalist to handle.

Courtesy: www.asianage.com, September 14, 2007