The arrest of any journalist is condemnable. Who was really behind the airing of the story about a Telangana minister and an IAS officer should be investigated, and those responsible should be prosecuted.
Published Jan 16, 2026 | 4:25 PM ⚊ Updated Jan 16, 2026 | 4:40 PM
The more you provoke base instincts in readers and viewers, the more attractive you become, the more patronage you get, and therefore the more money you make. (iStock)
Synopsis: Today, journalism is rarely something journalists do on their own; instead, what we see are only those “news items” ordered to be cooked up by owners, driven by their political and economic interests; in other words, tasks imposed by management.
Journalism, supposed to disseminate news to the world, has itself become news in Telangana this week.
A television channel aired a story claiming that an “affair” was on between a minister and a woman IAS officer, who had worked in the minister’s district. Other channels, newspapers, and YouTube channels picked it up.
The minister denied the news. Besides condemning it, the IAS Officers’ Association lodged a police complaint. The government clubbed this complaint with another complaint that arose against a WhatsApp group in the Narayanpet district and constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT).
The channel issued an apology. As I write this, the SIT investigation has begun with the arrest of three journalists.
When journalists are arrested, when the government attacks freedom of expression that is part of professional duty, condemning such action is a normal democratic convention. All three who were arrested are journalists, and they were arrested because of the professional duties they performed.
The arrest of any journalist is condemnable. Who was really behind the airing of that story should be investigated, and those responsible should be prosecuted.
Even while asserting that democratic expectation, one cannot avoid asking whether what they did can be termed journalism. Perhaps even saying “what they did” is not quite correct.
Today, journalism is rarely something journalists do on their own; instead, what we see are only those “news items” ordered to be cooked up by owners, driven by their political and economic interests; in other words, tasks imposed by management.
In this context, there needs to be a discussion about journalism itself, and about whether journalists have any right to violate individuals’ right to privacy.
The story that is now to be investigated may be entirely false and fabricated, or it may concern a purely personal matter between two individuals. Whether it is false or contains a grain of truth, it is purely a private matter of individuals that has no connection with journalism. Dragging it into the open is character assassination.
Even if there really were a relationship between them, society has nothing to do with it. Broadcasting it as a news story is only a reflection of the base culture of that media organisation.
Even though one of the two individuals involved is a state minister and the other a senior officer, there is no necessity to drag their personal lives into the marketplace. Doing so is nothing more than voyeurism (a base tendency akin to peeping through the gap of a bathroom door).
I hesitate even to call such cheap, vile, and vicious conduct journalism.
With over four decades of association with journalism, it feels shameful and humiliating to describe this story as journalism. Yet today, the owners of almost all newspapers and channels are parading precisely such degeneration as journalism. To that degeneration are added the political and economic interests of owners.
The false lesson taught by Telugu cinema—that the more you provoke base instincts in readers and viewers, the more attractive you become, the more patronage you get, and therefore the more money you make—is being followed to the letter by Telugu television.
Online newspapers and YouTube channels that have mushroomed are following the same path. This is, in essence, a problem of our social values. That story appeared on a well-known TV channel—one that annually organises Kartika month festivities, attracting lakhs of people in the heart of Hyderabad, letting devotional fervour overflow without any drainage system; a channel run by an owner who is a close friend to countless leaders of both ruling and opposition parties, including the chief minister himself.
Since it is generally the owners who decide, for their political and economic interests, which stories should be broadcast and which should not, the owner’s role in this story may be greater than that of the arrested journalists. Yet, so far, there is no news of the SIT investigation team even approaching the management.
There are also speculations that the chief minister himself may have supplied this sensational story to damage the image of one of his cabinet colleagues. Even though the finger of suspicion points towards the channel owner as well as the chief minister, the SIT may not investigate that aspect at all.
In a general atmosphere where all newspapers and channels are engaged in creating and propagating news to serve the political parties and personal agendas of political leaders, investigating where and how a particular piece of news originated is like picking hairs while eating in the dark. Allegations are also being heard that, in connection with the forthcoming Cabinet expansion, the Chief Minister’s Office itself is letting allegations against ministers it wishes to remove seep into newspapers and channels.
It is alleged that by spreading misconceptions and hostility against certain ministers, assassinating their character, the chief minister is trying to claim that he removed them for those very reasons. In truth, Cabinet expansion is something that should happen from time to time—some must be dropped and new ones inducted. That can be done democratically by the ruling party leadership and the chief minister through dialogue and persuasion with those to be removed. But when democracy itself, when dialogue itself, is utterly unavailable here, such stealthy and deceitful methods come to rule.
Be that as it may, whatever their political conspiracies, like calves having their legs broken in a fight between bulls, innocent individuals’ personal lives are being destroyed. Lies are circulating as news. Unrelated people are being subjected to humiliation and immense suffering. Social values themselves are being demolished.
Therefore, there is no use in dismissing this as merely their personal affair or as politics. Not just this one story, because of the ideology behind many such stories, countless women, the helpless, the poor, Dalits, Adivasis, and minorities are left as victims.
A poisonous social value is spreading through our minds: that for political and economic interests, one can write anything about people from these sections, broadcast anything, sling any amount of mud, and carry out any degree of character assassination. That is the real problem.
There was a time when values prevailed that news reports should not be written without complete and indisputable evidence, that the opinion of those against whom allegations were made should also be included, and that objective neutrality was vital to journalism. Now, for broadcast media that are in a hurry and are left only with personal selfish interests, evidence is not needed, proof is not needed, and the views of affected persons are not needed. Mere rumour can be turned into a story. Where there is nothing, where there is not even a grain, a mountain of imagination can be created. Where there is a little something, a single sentence can be repeated a hundred times, amplified with ear-splitting bangs, and an illusion created that it is the truth.
Abusing the proverb “Is there smoke without fire?”, we can ourselves invent the fire and create smoke that envelops the entire town. A baseless story fabricated at one place can circulate repeatedly through a hundred channels and YouTube platforms and return as “astonishing evidence” even against those who originally fabricated it.
Sri Sri once said, “People’s private lives are their own; if they stand publicly, we may comment.” But that does not mean that the private lives of those who stand in public should be made public. The statement that private lives are their own comes first. The politics conducted by that minister, what did or did not happen in his department, his policies, and the good or bad in the official conduct of that woman officer—these are the concerns and limits relevant to journalism.
Crossing that boundary and passing it off as journalism must necessarily be condemned. Because by crossing that boundary, the story entered personal domains, violated the right to privacy, and especially in the case of women, given prevailing social values and patriarchal, male-dominated, anti-woman ideologies, it inevitably turns into a moral discourse.
Gossip begins where there is nothing. Cheap allegations begin. This damages the self-confidence of the victims. Their social identity and standing are subjected to humiliation. Since journalists know this social reality better than others, they must exercise great caution when creating news reports and stories that make allegations against women and, more broadly, against oppressed sections. The absence of such caution is equivalent to the false tendencies known in Western countries as yellow journalism and paparazzi.
Paparazzi began as a so-called independent photojournalism profession—clicking and selling photographs of famous people from a distance with telephoto lenses, without their consent, including photographs they did not wish to reveal. We know how it ultimately chased and hounded Princess Diana and her companion Dodi Fayed, leading to a car crash that took their lives in August 1997.
Today, traditional paparazzi may no longer exist, but newspapers and channels that call themselves mainstream, and newly emerged social media platforms, are continuing the evil tradition of paparazzi. The channel that now stands accused is a new kind of paparazzi. Since it also has political interests, it is worse than paparazzi.
Therefore, what needs to be investigated and inquired into is not just one channel or one WhatsApp group, but the declining social values themselves. Part of that is the perspective that looks down upon women, humiliates them, and views them merely as sexual objects or objects of consumption.
A special investigation must be conducted into the vicious statement made by actor Sivaji, into the countless trolls that have long been insulting women on social media, and into the overall degrading culture that prevails in the Telugu film industry.
(Views are personal. Edited by Majnu Babu).
