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Media is under attack from different quarters and interestingly for right reasons. An innocuous column on English language in a national daily gave an example for Kangaroo courts in response to a reader’s query. It said “Some of the news channels have become Kangaroo courts”. Nothing can more aptly summarise the role the media is playing these days. In Kangaroo courts the legal rights of individuals are totally disregarded and justice is not served. It is a mock court. Some of the newspapers and television channels are playing the role of such a mock court without any regard for human rights or human dignity.

Let us take the example of the Tamil Press and TV. If you read them or watch them for a few days you will be made to believe that the beleaguered Kanchi seer, Jayendra Saaraswati was perhaps running a harem or the 70-year old seer must be a sex manic. No, not even innuendos are adopted! So-and-so woman was having “intimate” relationship with the Kanchi seer. A straight attack. In one of the Tamil news bulletins, the names of seven girls were read out as if they were some call girls who were supposed to be having “close relationship” with the Mutt.

What was the basis? Obviously, a Police plant. Let us be fair. It is not just one-way traffic. The Tamil Nadu police also took cues from the Press and started the investigation. A Tamil magazine reported that a budding television anchor and actress has “relationship” with the Mutt and that was enough for the Police to summon her for interrogation. After some time, it became difficult to decide who is prosecuting the seer – Police or the Press?

What is quite astonishing is the silence of the courts in not taking note of the most unethical and one-sided reporting by the media in the Sankaracharya episode. While the channels reported at length the prosecution point of view, either the defence argument was ignored completely or dismissed in one sentence. The judiciary has every right and responsibility to pull up the erring media, especially when the media indulged in character assassination of those who were in no way connected to the murder and in the process lost its balance. When there is no balanced reporting of the proceedings before the court, is it not for the courts to intervene in the interest of those who are unnecessarily dragged into the picture? What happened to judicial activism? Is it confined to the boundaries of Gujarat? So far as the television is concerned, it is jungle law in Tamil Nadu with accountability to none and malice to one and all with honourable exceptions depending on who owns the channel. But, what happened to the Press Council? Well, it may not have teeth. Atleast, it can make some noise or if I have to borrow from Sitaram Yechuri, the posterboy of CPI-M, the Council can atleast bark, if it can’t bite for lack of dental support.

Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Lal Krishna Advani was not wide off the mark when he said that Emergency-like situation prevailed in Tamil Nadu. How can a police official who was indicted by the Madras High Court as one who did not have any regard for law and truth and behaved like a barbarian, is allowed to handle the case involving the Sankaracharya. He has been specially brought from the neighbouring district because of his track record! When there was uproar against the manner in which the public prosecutors and the police were behaving in Gujrat in post-Godhra riot cases, did not the Supreme Court intervene? But, what is happening in Tamil Nadu? The chief of Special Investigating Team (SIT) is summoning people even if there is a slight mention in any of the Tamil magazines linking them to the Kanchi mutt like the infamous midnight knocks of the Emergency era. The climax was when a columnist was summoned to Kanchipuram to know the source of his writings. Are you not reminded of Emergency days? Amazingly, the Tamil media, with honourable exceptions, have no time to raise its voice against this trend as it is busy generating sleazy gossips day in and day out to boost its circulation and viewership.

Look at the contrast in Kerala where one of the cabinet ministers, P.K. Kunhalikutty, who is accused of involvement in a sex scandal continues to be in the cabinet happily and his party – Indian Union Muslim League – terming it “essentially an internal matter of the party”. The secular lobby which wants the law to take its course in Tamil Nadu wants the course to be twisted out of shape in Kerala. When hundreds of letters to the Editor were published asking the Kanchi seer to step down from the “Peetam”, we couldn’t hear the same cacophony against the continuance of Kutty in the Kerala cabinet.

While it was an act of omission in Kerala, it was an act of commission in Andhra Pradesh which made the state chief minister Y S Rajasekara Reddy to go hammer and tongs against the media. He warned of legal action if newspapers indulged in biased reporting to malign the image of the state government. The Congress chief minister was more concerned about the image of the government and not the human dignity or character of the individuals which is being tarnished in his neighbouring state. Perhaps, the former Chief of Army Staff, K V Krishna Rao was the only one who was forthright in expressing his disapproval of the biased reporting. When a national television channel had been hammering in its bulletins that the troop withdrawal in Jammu and Kashmir was not really a pullout, but just a substitution, Rao outrightly dismissed it as “mere gossip”.

The role of the Indian Press, especially the electronic media, in handling the family feud of Ambani brothers was also under attack during the last couple of weeks. If you surf any channel, either it was Sankaracharya or Ambani brothers as if there was nothing else happening in the world. The dividing line between gossip and information was completely erased and every channel was busy in mind-reading and face-reading in the absence of bytes from the horses’ mouth

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