A day of shame for Journalists

The recent Mira Radia tape leaks with top notch journalists i.e. Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi has shocked the people who are in the profession and people alike. Though media continues to downplay the incident;they face a heavy flak in blogs and twitter community. Though the modus operandi followed in the incident is not new to the people in the profession but it has seriously invoked a skeptic outlook about the credibility of 'public opinion' creaters from my own perview. I had once listened to Barkha Dutt in a seminar at pune; she looked smart and confident about the way she has accomplished a niche in the industry for herself through her reporting, but this is the second dent to her image before which i had admired her a lot.
She has not taken the responsibilty and instead termed this episode as an 'error of judgement' which i think is a very weak argument in the lieu of the extent of the damage done to the whole profession. Journalists work through their entire life for compromising remuneration( earliar though the story has changed now) to build a credibility.
Imagine a reporter without credibility or trust value, will you read what he or she writes and make an opinion out of that!
I dont proclaim that one should have an holier than thou attitude while approaching work but still there are some ethics which are to be maintained. Robin hood of ancient times was not a hypocite when he used trickery and voilence to teach some manners to rich and profess soft heartedness to poor. He had a different kind of work ethics which suited to his whole purpose. Also one should not be judging him for his life style. This is the major flaw here because we either strictly follow a code or just completely ignore it. You see morality cannot be deifned in black and white, there is some gray attached to it. Same follows with different leaders and their approaches- see for eg. shashri ji used to wear old shirt inside a nice jacket not because he had none just because he would say to her wife that it didnt matter how i look when i serve my position. Gandhi ji just like any other simple young man had himself find in the places of conflict when he had to choose between various forms of morality. Some he did fail while doing so but he corrected them via accepting them blatantly by writing a whole book about it- My Experiments with Truth.

My sole objective here is to identify with the need now for Vir Sanghvi and Barkha to simply take responsibility of their actions and do the needful to convince masses like us who are still take their words for granted! I still remember how we used to take HT's editorial stuff directly into debate matter in school for academics. Now if i get to know that its principal columnist Vir Sanghvi is biased and a political lobbiyst, i just feel cheated and my buddies would want to meet him personally to shower garlands on him!

Another thing here is that 'English Media' over the years has grown into our times because we have a perception that their presentation is professional and cool, but my friends please dont go only on the appearance here because still Hindi Media is way more richer in content and more over they are more accountable to Indian public as they are read by masses. Utilmately it is papers lile Punjab Kesari who have shown the true power of 'pen' and 'words'.

So i m in a fix now as to what paper i should tell my hawker to fetch me tommorow onwards. I guess The Hindu is still with some decent level of reporting left so that becomes my only option. Bye Bye HT so long!
I'll miss calvin and hobbes though but i dont have to be emotional its time to say good bye to my favourite cartoon strip of all times. Oh barkha why u have to do this! And Vir i liked you because of your food and travel articles, i guess now you will be limited to them for some more time to come.

Till then Karan Thapar would be just fine and Prabhu chawla i like your sense of humor but that doesnt mean i will take your views for granted. My eyes are on you!

I think i gotta see more of 'Lie to Me' episodes so that i can catch you jerks!