When Bollywood Turns Its Gaze on Journalists

In Graham Greene’s famous novel A Burnt-Out Case, Parkinson is a scheming and sensation-seeking journalist who tries to cast a disillusioned architect as a saint to grab eyeballs. Greene has this to say about this disingenuous reporter: “Virtue had died long ago within the mountain of flesh for lack of air.’’ On the other hand, Thomas Fowler, in Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American, is a British journalist in his mid-fifties, and posted in Saigon. He loves to call himself a reporter, and believes in conveying facts simply and objectively.

These two fictional characters, with diametrically opposite characteristics, help us get a sense of a profession – warts and all – which is considered noble even today.

Journalism, to use the cliché, is the lifeblood of any democracy. The job of a journalist, in countries like ours, is fraught with challenges and threats – especially in such turbulent times. The role of the media is to present the news to the reader in all its shades – white, black or grey. It takes guts and conviction to go against the grain and stand up for what’s right. Their integrity can be as unyielding as granite.

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In recent times, there have been movies from Bollywood that tend to show the media in an unflattering light, laying bare its Jekyll and Hyde personality. Journalists and editors have been depicted as social climbers, morally fallible and manipulative because they know which side their bread is buttered on. There have also been movies that have explored the role of journalists in society that portray them as idealists and social crusaders, ready to put their lives on the line while discharging their duties and responsibilities.

In Mashaal (1984), Dilip Kumar is an honest journalist and is as tough as nails. He runs a newspaper called ‘Mashaal’, and keeps exposing business/political shenanigans through his investigative stories. Trouble starts brewing when he blows the lid on the drug trafficking business of a wealthy and well-respected businessman. The businessman tries to buy his silence by offering him money, but the ploy doesn’t work. He tries to use every trick in the book to make life miserable for this journalist who, despite much intimidation, throws down the gauntlet at the unscrupulous businessman.

Scam 1992 (2020), an edge-of-the-seat series, deals with the infamous Harshad Mehta scam. The movie revolves around an intrepid woman journalist, Sucheta Dalal, who, with her indefatigable probe of the financial shenanigans of Harshad Mehta, pieces together the jigsaw puzzle linking the scamster to the stock market. After her relentless digging for information from various sources, she brings to the public eye how Mehta threw banking system and stock-markets into turmoil. The movie is a tribute to women journalists of our country who display immense commitment in the face of countless challenges.

The hugely disturbing New Delhi Times (1986) conveys the fundamental duality that plagues all journalists — the adrenaline rush of chasing a ‘good story’ that is also a human tragedy. A fearless newspaper editor, Vikas Pande (Shashi Kapoor), manages to save press photographer Anwar in a communally volatile Ghaziabad. When they reach the hotel room, Anwar says, “On reaching here, I found out that riots have erupted. I was thrilled. I just jumped at it.”

When a visibly surprised Pande asks him, “You are thrilled by riots?”, Anwar says, “You understood exactly what I was saying. You found a good story. I clicked some good photographs. What else.” One is reminded of the newspaper baron Gail Wynand’s exhortation to reporters in the famous novel The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, “When there is no news, make it.’’

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In the satirical comedy Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983), a canny and opportunistic female editor of a magazine exploits two young and gullible photographers by asking them to shoot pictures of a killer while blackmailing him to extort money. The movie exposes the seamier side of journalism where the editor can even misuse his/her authority to achieve sinister motives.

In Mumbai Meri Jaan (2008), the fiancé of a successful female TV reporter, dies in a bomb explosion in the first-class compartment of a local train. The news channel she works for decides to cash in on her personal tragedy to ramp up its TRP rating.

Peepli Live (2010), a dark comedy on TV journalism, subtly captures the desperate hunt for TRP ratings among channels. In the movie, an impecunious farmer decides to commit suicide knowing well that after his death, his family would get hefty compensation from the government. When a journalist gets wind of this, he immediately gloms on to this incident and goes live, with the viewers glued to their TV sets watching the minute-by-minute spectacle unfolding before their eyes. J.M. Coetzee was spot on when he wrote in Disgrace, “Private life is public business. Prurience is respectable…’’

In Paatal Lok, a web television series that released in 2020, the megalomaniac editor of a news channel is so blinded by his image that truth no longer matters to him. He has grown a carapace over his soul, and his social conscience has hit the buffers.

Be that as it may, both print and electronic media continue to keep the political class on its toes with varying degrees of success. Had it not been for the unrelenting gaze of television cameras and the commitment of print journalists, many sordid scams and scandals involving politicians and people in high places would not have broken into the public consciousness.

Every profession has a few bad apples, but there are a large number of equally committed members who work their guts out in pursuit of excellence. Journalists are no exception.

Aditya Mukherjee is a Delhi-based journalist.

Featured image: Pariplab Chakraborty