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The Slippery Slope of Stings
After the success of the Aaj Tak?Cobrapost sting, nearly everybody in the media has got used to the concept of the sting operation-for-hire, writes Vir Sanghvi.
After the success of the Aaj Tak–Cobrapost sting, nearly everybody in the media has got used to the concept of the sting operation-for-hire. The way it works is this: an enterprising journalist/web site/small news organisation sets up a sting operation. When the results are in and the victims are trapped on audio or video tape, the perpetrators of the sting approach a large media outlet and offer to sell the story.
Faced with this kind of offer, many large news organisations are tempted to bite. Stings are very much the flavour of the month. For TV news channels functioning in an extremely competitive environment, they provide an opportunity to win the ratings wars and — when the story spills over into other news media — to capture the mind space of target audiences.
Moreover, a sting is — almost by definition — the sort of story that a proper TV journalist cannot do. It requires ‘reporters’ to masquerade as other people and most TV journos — whose faces are well-known from repeated exposure on the box — lack the anonymity required to pretend to be arms dealers/star aspirants/whatever. Far easier, therefore, to buy the story from somebody else who has hired unknown faces and done the dirty work required to set the traps.
There is now a measure of consensus in the news business that it is legitimate to buy ready-made stings from smaller operators. Apart from anything else, the large news organisation also buys deniability — if it later transpires that the people who ran the sting paid bribes, hired call girls to soften up sources or engaged in any kind of activity that might later prove embarrassing, the buyer can disclaim all knowledge.
Almost every serious journalist I know admits to a deep disquiet about stings. There are simply too many moral grey areas for any of us to be truly comfortable with this kind of journalism. And yet, we tell ourselves that it is okay; that stings often represent the only way of establishing the truth about such issues as political corruption even if the notion of entrapment makes us uneasy.
My fear is that our moral ambivalence on the issue will come back to haunt us. I have been looking at the experience of Western media when it comes to sting journalism and what I have found worries me. In the US, most newspapers reject the notion of willful entrapment, arguing that it does not constitute legitimate journalistic activity.
In the UK however — and especially in the tabloid press — stings are part of everyday life. At the News of The World, for instance, there is a senior reporter of Pakistani origin whose primary responsibility is to wear disguises and trick people into believing that he is somebody else. His stings include the famous story where he pretended to represent on Arab sheikh looking for PR representation from a firm owned by the Countess of Wessex (the wife of Prince Edward, the Queen's youngest son).
The Countess spoke indiscreetly to him (William Hague looked ‘deformed’; Cherie Blair was ‘horrid, horrid, horrid’, Camilla Parker-Bowles and Prince Charles were “number one on the top ten unpopular people” etc.) and the News of the World promptly printed her remarks.
You could argue — though I would probably not agree — that the British tabloid press’ approach to stings is robust, healthy and worth emulating and the US media’s hand-wringing on the subject is tiresome and unnecessary.
But if India does choose to follow the British model, then there is another trend that we will have to contend with, sooner rather than later: cheque book journalism.
In Britain, nearly all newspapers pay sources for information. I’ve just finished reading autobiography of Max Clifford, the PR man who sells stories to the press and the most interesting revelation is that nearly every big story to feature in the popular press over the last two decades involved paying off sources. Rebecca Loos and David Beckham; the Jeffrey Archer perjury scandal; Faria Alam and the Football Association; David Mellor and Antonia de Sancha; Pamella Bordes, Princess Diana and James Hewitt; and many, many more.
It is a view confirmed by nearly everything else I have seen or read on the subject. In Piers Morgan’s book (The Insider, a sort of diary-in-retrospect by the former editor of the Daily Mirror), he reveals how editors of British papers are quite happy to buy stories sold to them the likes of Clifford. In the highly acclaimed British TV mini-series, State of Play, about a newspaper uncovering a political scandal, the hero (an investigative reporter) only gets to talk to sources (including witnesses to a murder) after he has negotiated a rate with them. Everything is for sale. And nothing is free.
Clifford offers a defence of cheque book journalism in his book and it has a certain logic. According to him, all media outlets (newspapers, TV stations, etc.) stand to make a lot of money out of a scoop. Why should the person who makes the scoop possible — the source at the centre of the story — not share in some of this wealth? Whose definition is it of freedom of press that it only enriches newspaper proprietors while exploiting the stories and lifes of ordinary people?
TV channels, on both sides of the Atlantic, are more willing to pay for stories. When a figure at the centre of a big story decides to talk, the decision about who to talk to is often determined by commercial considerations. When Monica Lewinsky was ready to give an interview, various TV shows offered her large sums of money to choose them over the competition. The argument, presumably, was the same as Clifford’s: if the channel was going to make money out of Lewinsky, why shouldn't she share in the profits?
To some extent, India already has a culture of paying for interviews in some fields. For instance, cricketers are put under contract by TV channels who, then, refuse to let them speak to anybody else. In effect, the channel is paying the cricketers for exclusive interviews.
At some level, I can understand the logic of paying off cricketers or movie stars. But chequebook journalism has worrying implications. It nearly always favours the richer media outlets. And when you pay sources for impartial information about serious stories, it seems to me to soil that information and to strike at the heart of the journalistic process.
For instance, can you imagine a murder case where a key witness will only speak if he’s paid off by a newspaper? Or a political scandal where a minister’s PA dishes the dirt on his boss in return for a hefty pay-off from the press?
It may sound unimaginable to us. But it happens all the time in the UK.
One of my fears about sting journalism is that it is the first step on road to cheque book news-gathering. Because we are content to outsource the sting operation itself, we turn a blind eye to bribes that the sting operators offer sources.
Given how TV news is full of stings these days, my guess is that it is only a matter of time before news organisations end the arms’ length safeguard and start paying off witnesses, sources and interviewees themselves. Competition will force the channels into this position first and the print media will then follow.
As you’ve probably guessed, I loathe the idea of cheque book journalism and I am repulsed by the laziness of simply calling up a source and offering an envelope filled with cash in return for some information. Moreover, once journos start doing that, how different will we seem from the sort of sleazy businessmen who pay babus for secret files? I worry too that the tendency to outsource the journalistic activity — and some sting operators simply hire detectives to do their investigation for them — is certain to lead to an erosion of journalistic values: detectives have no reason to subscribe to these values.
But even if we are going to follow the lead of the British tabloid press, shouldn’t we at least debate the ethics of the new journalism? The biggest threat to freedom of the press in India does not come from politicians. It comes from ourselves and emerges from our tendency to do whatever it takes in the pursuit of a story — because all we care about are ratings.
