Guilty, till proved innocent

One of the biggest passions of the media the world over is chasing the celebrity once he has committed or appears to have committed some wr...

One of the biggest passions of the media the world over is chasing the celebrity once he has committed or appears to have committed some wrong. Time and again, we hear of some crime or mistake by a celebrity or celebrity offspring and the media goes to town with flyers, major stories and inputs from all over. Very few newspapers carry out investigative journalism and uncover plots, scams and the loot of public money.

In most cases, a celebrity is found to be on the wrong side of the law and newspapers (and worse still, the TV channels) send out their cub reporters to create hype over the issue. If Salman Khan is found to be involved in a road accident the media reports nothing but Khan. Truly, would the nation have bothered if the same accident had happened with an unknown and non-celebrity at the wheel? Yet newspapers carried stories on his fake ownership of the car, his possible underworld connections, and the much talked about split with Aishwarya Rai. What does his personal life have to do with the accident? Can we safely assume, then, that all the truck and bus drivers who kill at will on Delhi roads are lovelorn?

There are many names in this pantheon. Manu Sharma, Vikas Yadav, Bharat Shah Sanjay Dutt, R.K. Sharma, Sushil Sharma — all undertrials about whose guilt the judiciary is still to decide. And yet in public minds, they are convicted. There are more names of people against whom there are mere allegations and no concrete evidence so far. The so-called match fixing scam in cricket has turned out to be one such case.

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Another flimsy case was the hawala racket in which many top politicians were supposedly involved. All the CBI and police had were fragments of a diary supposedly written by the Jain brothers. Everyday we would see one politicain or another being hounded by the media. What happened in the end? All accused, except one were let off for want of evidence. That a politician meets many people daily and gets photographed is no crime. And if one of them also maintains a fake diary with intentions of letting it be recovered by the police, can we persecute the named persons on the basis of that fragile evidence?

But the harm is done. By the time the trial is held, the accused is already a villain in the eyes of the people and has spent huge money as legal costs. Some may even have spent time behind bars. Some may lose their lives during the wait.

It is no one’s case that we should be soft on celebrities. Hang them by all means but first make the effort to collect concrete evidence against them. Their careers and incomes depend upon their public image. Once implicated in a case, false or otherwise, their career is over. Who compensates them when they come clean out of the legal mess?

And when one of them stands up gallantly and gives testimony against the big, bad world like Preity Zinta or the unknown police inspector in the infamous BMW case in Delhi, who stuck to his version even in the face of intimidation and allurements, no newspaper or TV channel devotes more than the cursory column space and newstime to them. Because by this time, the media has already moved on to the next story.