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The sting in the tale

Beaten up, arrested, jailed, dismissed from her job, and disgraced as a procuress — the terrible travails of Uma Khurana offend every canon of decency and fairness. Strings of people were responsible for this indefensible crime against the Delhi schoolteacher, the victim of a fake sting operation. First and foremost, the television channel that broadcast the undercover ‘investigation’ suggesting Ms. Khurana pushed her girl students into prostitution. Next , the irate mob that damaged and torched vehicles and destroyed public property soon after the sting was telecast. The Delhi police, which buckled under public pressure and summarily arrested her under the Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act. The media, which jumped to conclusions, without verifying the facts. And finally, the Delhi government, which dismissed her on the basis of the recommendations of a committee, a couple of days after the sting. As the first mover in this shocking story of how a woman was framed, the television channel — particularly the reporter who filed the fake story — is primarily responsible for the travesty. If the reporter and his young woman accomplice who pretended to be one of Ms. Khurana’s students were perpetrators of the crime, the channel itself acted extremely irresponsibly in not properly vetting a story that was full of holes.

At a larger level, the fake undercover operation focusses attention on the lengths to which the highly competitive television news channels will go to catch eyeballs. Sting operations of dubious merit, in which reporters go out of the way to persuade individuals into behaving inappropriately before capturing them on hidden cameras, have become a staple with some news channels. The most notorious example of this was the sting pulled off on a Bollywood actor by a reporter who posed as a starlet aspiring for a break into the industry and not averse to the casting couch. Journalism that relies on deception must satisfy at least three professional norms: the information pursued must relate to a larger social and public purpose, the value of such information to society must outweigh the injury caused by deception, and undercover methods must be used only as a last resort when information cannot be obtained by straightforward means. The use of unethical techniques of newsgathering can only strengthen the government’s misguided attempt to regulate the broadcasting industry. A code of conduct governing sting operations — that would allow only purposeful and socially relevant undercover journalism on rare occasions under supervision at the highest level — could be the first step towards drawing up a blueprint for the self-regulation of the broadcasting industry.

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