Secret Handshakes With A Serpent

Journalism or sensationalism? Cobrapost’s sting operation on media houses adds fuel to an ongoing ethical debate.

- Ushinor Majumdar

A reporter assumes a disguise, changes his/her identity and goes undercover with hidden cameras. The danger, the thrill, the wide range of possibilities sound very romantic and at the same time raise concerns. Is it ethical journalism? Is it only just feeding into voyeurism for which there is a waiting audience? Should conversations caught surreptitiously on tape or camera later be made public?

The latest debate has sprung from the two-part Operation 136, released by the investigative journalism outfit Cobrapost.com. The first part, targeting 17 media houses, was released during a press conference on March 26 and dominated social media conversations for days. Cobrapost’s press release lays out the way in which journalist Pushp Sharma assumed an undercover identity, ‘Acharya Atal’, and went about with a fictitious assignment of buying space for advertorials and planting news stories in various media outlets with an aim to polarise communities and manipulate elections.

The second part shows the operation conducted on 27 other organisations and has created more ripples as those allegedly stung include some big media houses. Some of the people recorded talk of a compromised relationship with pol it icians while being baited by the und e r cover reporter. Many say they are willing to accept cash and some even describe the mechanism of cash payments to buy space. The notable exceptions are Dainik Samwad and the Bengali daily Bartaman. In fact, the latter’s marketing head gives Sharma a lecture on ethics when he raises the stakes tenfold to Rs 10 crore.