Shouldn’t scribes behave themselves?

The execrable behaviour of journalists in Mysore at the cremation of the husband of Nidhi Kulapathi, a New Delhi television anchor, last week could have been dismissed as churlishness from testosterone-rich males but for the regularity with which scribes in that City fail to remember that they are in the business to report news, not to make it. Admittedly, the lady’s action of snatching a photographer’s camera chip for shooting pictures of a family affair and threatening to speak to the chief minister wasn’t entirely above reproach. And that the police did not order a post-mortem on the body found in mysterious circumstances in a hotel room with gnashes under the eye can be questioned. Still, to use that as a licence to hold up the final rites demanding an apology from the grieving widow at the funeral pyre takes mind-bending insensitivity and shamelessness, and Mysore’s scribes have provided both by the bucketful.
At one level, the journalists’ rudeness should leave their readers wondering if they have become a law unto themselves, with none of the social norms and graces that apply to ordinary humans being applicable to them. At another level, the journalists’ arrogant presumption that they have a fundamental right to intrude shows just where ‘gotcha’ journalism is heading. If this is what journalists can do to one of their own, God forbid what they can do to the rest. Whether a prominent personality’s private life is automatically of public interest can be debated till the media bulls come home. But there can be little debate that Mysore’s editors, reporters and photographers and their various associations and guilds need to introspect big-time on their recent conduct to prevent readers from becoming cynical and suspicious. The simple question they need to ask themselves is this: do they want to set an example as the eyes and ears of the public? Or do they want to flex their muscles at the risk of their credibility?