Who cares for ethics?

IN an age where media is market driven and operating in a tremendously competitive scenario, figuring out what is ethical and what is not is tricky. Is a sting operation ethical when it uncovers corruption in public life? The public response to Tehelka's Operation Westend shows that many feel the answer is yes. The ends justify the means. But is Zee TV's purchase of rights and simultaneous telecast of the tape footage across 15 channels - so that you can charge advertisers unprecedented rates - ethical?

Much of the telecast material is after all unsubstantiated loose talk. Lots of libellous statements are made. As Arun Jaitley pointed out during a discussion on Zee News, following the telecast of an episode of Operation Westend, arms middlemen can be expected to brag about the big fish they know because they are trying to impress the arms dealers they are negotiating with about their high level contacts. You cannot peddle their boasts as unimpeachable evidence. You could even argue that Tehelka could have edited more of the libellous name dropping out of the transcript and the accompanying tapes that were released.

A good news documentary based on the evidence in the Tehelka tapes would have taken a lot longer to produce, and would have meant something more than just buying rights of sensational footage and slapping ads on to it. The BBC series on Watergate was a painstaking effort. They took the evidence, the tapes, the characters, did many, many interviews, and then produced a rivetting series.

Hollywood, on the other hand, didn't lose any time in making the most of the same scandal once it had been turned into a best selling book. "All the President's Men" shown last month on HBO, continues several years after it was made to pull in money from a scandal involving the US presidency. And several years later with "Primary Colours", another set of scandals involving another president, the movie industry did the same. With fiction, even if it is fiction based on fact, you can.

A news organisation is expected to behave differently though. True, Zee News got together a panel after each episode of the telecast of the Tehelka tapes. But that wasn't quite the same thing as taking the evidence and doing a lot more cross-checking and investigating to build a credible news series on it. All they did was book ads on the primary evidence while the story was hot. Any one who watched it saw as many ad breaks on it as the celebrity episode of "Kaun Banega Crorepati" with Madhuri Dixit and Sachin Tendulkar.

Similarly, is Zee TV's strategically timed announcement of a new serial called "Pradhan Mantri", which has as its central character a prime minister who comes to power "in the midst of defence scandals", ethical? The quotes are from their publicity materail The announcement was made exactly a week from the day the story broke. The serial begins on Friday at 10 p.m. on Zee TV. Zee says this series, directed by Ketan Mehta, has been under preparation for nearly three months. Really! What a coincidence.

Tarun Tejpal of Tehelka has stoutly asserted that nobody knew of the undercover operation they mounted, even in the month or more that it took to transcribe and edit the material. So it would be uncharitable to suggest that Mr. Ketan Mehta knew that defence scandals would be timely by the time his serial went on air. Or that Zee being on the inside track because it was negotiating to buy a stake in the dotcom, knew enough to get saleable follow-up products going.

Buffalo Networks, which incorporates the Tehelka website, will, through its sister concern Buffalo Books, soon churn out a potential bestseller on Operation Westend. What it boils down to is this, should you have any qualms about making as much money as you can off a scandal? What a naive question, all those TV channels which bid for the footage of the Tehelka expose would say. If you didn't, how would news channels stay in business? Nothing much came of the hawala transactions probe by way of convictions, but when the story broke three or four years ago, the press lived off it quite substantially. In the bargain, reputations were permanently besmirched.

It is tricky and somewhere along the line public response has to take its share of responsibility for shaping the market that serves up what it thinks the public will lap up. Television ratings on some international channels touched an all time high in the hours following Princess Diana's death. Was the watching public being voyeuristic or were the TV channels exploiting her death? Could you do the second without the first?

This may seem an unrelated example, but now we live in a country where TV characters get killed off in the course of a story, and then resurrected because viewers protest the death so vehemently. I refer to Mihir in "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi". It is bizarre. He was shown as dead at the site of an accident, the body covered with a sheet, uncovered long enough by a weeping uncle to confirm that it was him. Now we are told that, actually, he ended up in coma in a hospital. A dead man comes back to life. If there is an issue of ethics in story telling, it is unethical. But it gets the ratings, because the market which is made up of you and I and the rest of the neighbourhood cares a fig for ethics.

SEVANTI NINAN

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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