Is Wikileaks Kind Of Experiment Thinkable In India?
By B.F Firos
28 July, 2010
Countercurrents.org
It is being hailed as ‘data journalism’, may be because of the enormous volume of secret files unearthed by Wikileaks, the whistle-blower website started by a maverick messiah of the wronged from Australia named Julian Assange (in picture). Little lights of hope when we thought we are heading for a cul-de-sac.
The 92,000 military documents detail the criminal misadventures of an occupation army led by the US, shamelessly called coalition forces. A coalition of murderers fit to be tried in an international court of law.
What was striking about the whole thing is the exciting collaboration of three media houses, viz. London-based The Guardian, New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel. While Wikileaks unearthed large volumes of raw data, the job of sifting through the entire documents and bringing out the relevant and explosive materials was left to these newspapers and the magazine.
The symbiosis between Wikileaks and these mainstream media houses is praiseworthy and heralds a new era in the world of investigative journalism. A true novel experiment in journalism that needs nourishment and support from all those people who have a good heart, because what this collaboration aims to target is corrupt regimes, war-mongering maniacs and the like.
This rare media experiment makes me think what it would be like in India if a similar sort of exposure is initiated by Wikileaks.
“I would love to start an operation from India as well!” Assange told Nupur Basu from UC Berkeley when she met him during a seminar on investigative journalism. He seemed to be excited when she told him about the sting operations in India.
But can he? India is a country where even naming a competitor in a newspaper’s pages is considered sacrilegious, let alone collaborating. In this crazy dog-eat-dog overcrowded media world, it will be foolish to think about such a teamwork. What could be the reasons? Petty ego, parochialism, fears of giving undue advantage to the competitor, wrong notions of public interest journalism…?
During my stint in MiDDAY, Bangalore, one of our editors from Mumbai suggested a new weekly column to carry those news we missed during the week with due credit to the respective newspapers. What’s wrong with? After all, he said, life is very short. Though his suggestion wasn’t implemented, I knew those were the words of sanity, rare in the media.
How long will it take for the Indian media to work in collaboration the way Guardian and others did for the common good of the society, untethered by those obnoxious notions of competition, petty ego, etc? Thousand years? May be.
Well, let’s forget about collaboration. Remember the criminal silence of the Indian mainstream media when Tehelka was mowed down ruthlessly by the Indian government led by the rightwing Hindu nationalist government after it exposed the stinking corruption in the corridors of Indian military. Was it envious of Tehelka? It was one of the rare and sad instances in the history of media freedom when the BJP government virtually unleashed a witch hunt on Tehelka, raiding its offices, falsely implicating its journalists and virtually annihilating the brave venture. It’s another matter that it bounced back like a phoenix. But the Indian media didn’t extend its support when it was needed most, during the moments of crisis faced by one of its peers.
