When journalists become the news….. That’s what Barkha Dutt, the Christiane Amanpour of Indian journalism became, when she found her ‘pretty’ face plastered on two magazine covers and sundry billboards across the country over two successive weeks; her name dragged willy-nilly into Radiagate as the woman who asks a corporate fixer – the desperate tone makes one cringe - “what shall I tell them, tell me, what should I tell them..”
As did Vir Sanghvi. Once admired countrywide for his potent “most, most read” weekly fulminations, now reduced to perching on a balcony in Bangkok, who is also heard on the tapes asking Niira Radia “what should I write..”.
Despite a very clever feint to prove to the world that the column that followed bore no resemblance to what the remarkable Ms Radia does tell him should go into the piece on natural gas as a scarce national resource(!), he has actually followed her instructions to the letter!! The blot on Ms Dutt’s copybook is that she does not disseminate the information on her television channel that corporates were vying with one another to fix Cabinet berths.
Nor, far more interestingly, does she go public with the fact that the whispered war between members of the fratricidal Karunanidhi clan was fact not fiction. When she, more than anybody on the day, had proof! After print and broadcast finally caught up with the blogosphere which has seen hundreds tear into their wayward icons — yes, granted the whistleblowers were two prescient weeklies — the fact that the media has been shown to have clay feet really should be no real surprise.

Just as questions of probity have been raised from time to time about the other sacred cow, the judiciary — the most recent being the Supreme Court saying there’s something rotten in the Allahabad High Court — surely, members of the fourth estate could not have remained immune.
How many journalists do you know, who habitually let drop sotto voce, their proximity to the men and women who call the shots in government; and by extension, business and industry. Most, would be the answer.
It’s the proximity, folks, that yields the story. And equally, opens up the space for manipulation. By both sides.
As Ms Dutt says of the stellar star cast on the Radia tapes, during one of the most bizarre television programmes of all time when she invited an avuncular cast to grill her on the subject in her own studio, “anybody who’s anybody is on that tape.”
Not that it makes it any better, but while there’s no implication of financial impropriety, no hand in the cookie jar, these are transgressions majeure of another kind – they point to a willingness to take dictation, to take direction from someone who clearly has no business dictating terms to a media house of the stature of NDTV and Hindustan Times.
True, other hacks with rumoured links have gotten away and been rewarded by successive governments with seats in the Rajya Sabha or posts as media advisors to the party, or were given newspapers and media companies. And Mr Sanghvi and Ms Dutt’s cardinal error is that their private conversations with Ms Radia have made such manipulation public — one’s ‘attempt’ at influencing cabinet formation, the other’s at influencing public opinion on the Ambani feud. They made it far worse by arranging for a spectacle on television that absolved nobody and did nothing for their reputations.
Mr Sanghvi has moved out of the public domain for now by stopping or having his column stopped. Ms Dutt carries on. While she clearly lost the plot and her temper with Open editor Manu Joseph, the red rag to her bull, bearing the brunt of her anger, her inability to accept that talking to Radia and promising to intercede with the Congress bigwigs on behalf of the DMK leader Kanimozhi was THE flaw, that this was the “error of judgement ” makes it difficult for anyone to trust her bonafides.
From now on, every time she appears in our offices and living rooms, every time she hosts a show and takes on the role of public prosecutor, as the evangelical game-changer, the unspoken question in our collective consciousness will be this — what’s the hidden agenda? What does she know that she’s not telling us? Unless the duo open themselves up to a probe, their word will always be suspect.