#Cobrapost sting: Some hard questions on hard cash

The Cobrapost sting against leading media organisations is essentially a story of pure profit motive and greed. It is also a story that will die in due course of time — who in the mainstream media has reported on it so far except The Indian Express?

Here’s what the tapes purportedly tell us for those who didn’t watch it: Journalist Pushp Sharma goes undercover as Acharya Atal of the Shri Bhagwat Geeta Prachar Samiti, which does not exist. He claims a close connection with “Nagpur” and says he is responsible for getting deals with media houses to run content that promotes Hindutva.

He offers to spend large amounts of money for ‘advertising’ in a variety of channels and newspapers. The amounts dangled as revenue ranged from just above a crore to a staggering Rs 500 crore. There was also the promise of long-term associations and even more money.

In return, media houses would have to run content in a phased manner. The first level would include content around Shri Krishna and the Bhagwad Geeta (what is said in the tapes is that Shri Ram had become ‘too controversial’) – this would create a sort of goodwill for the Hindutva ideology. At the second level, there would be skits around pappu, bua, and babua (Rahul Gandhi, Mayawati, and Akhilesh Yadav) – satire that would poke fun at their policies. And, lastly, just before the elections, there would be polarising content.

This was the ask from “Acharya Atal” and while there were assertions of editorial independence, no one countered the ask (at least in the videos that I have seen).

The modus operandi is similar. “Acharya Atal” seeks a sales manager and dangles the carrot of long-term advertising revenue, which has many zeros at the end of it. In an ad-crunch market, the sales manager bites. He brings in his superior. And before you know it “Acharya Atal” is making his way up the corporate hierarchy. At some point, the person who takes a call on ‘editorial integration’ is called in. That person is senior – CEO, vice chairman-level senior. Editorial integration is essentially a euphemism for integrating advertorial content in actual news. The editorial person and the sales team, then, begin discussing with “Acharya Atal” on how the integration will be managed. And soon enough the conversation veers to how the monies will be paid. “Acharya Atal” is clear that a substantial chunk of it will be paid in cash. He says this cash will be routed using a foreign account.

The most striking aspect of the sting operation is that no one in the system thinks of verifying “Acharya Atal” or the Shri Bhagwat Geeta Prachar Samiti. This in a world of simple Google searches.

There are many reactions to the sting. Most of it in the mainstream media verge on denial. One point of view is that a “hidden camera sting is not a valid form of journalism”. Another refrain is that the video and audio are selectively edited to “manufacture a story”. There is a third view that says media organisations were trying to ‘reverse sting’ the journalist to report it to police authorities.

There is a fourth view that has less to do with views on the sting, and more to do with the nature of the sting – this view is that media houses don’t necessarily have a Right-wing bias, if the undercover journalist had suggested promoting Left-wing agenda instead of Hindutva, media houses would have reacted in the same way.

They would have jumped in, head first, trying to acquire the dangled bait – crores of rupees as advertising revenue. All these points merit consideration and are valid in their own right.

However, there is another part to the sting. And that has less to do with the content of the sting, as much as management decision-making in news media organisations.

What is evident from the clips that I have seen is this: some news media organisations featured in the sting seem to have a pre-existing protocol to deal with cash for stories. They seem to have a well-established process to get sales to work with editorial and the client to push stories not labelled as “sponsored stories” into the main news feed as native news. This is only a natural progression from the advent of paid news and private treaties in the media business. Remember one of the most successful media barons in the country had said: “We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business.” In the Cobrapost sting, it is apparent that the audience is not to know that the sponsored content is not news content. Nor is the regulator.

TRAI has very clear-cut guidelines for carrying advertisements:

(1) No broadcaster shall carry in its broadcast of a programme, advertisements exceeding twelve minutes in a clock hour and any shortfall of advertisement duration in any clock hour shall not be carried over.

(2) The advertisements in the clock hour shall include all types of advertisements including advertisements promoting the channel(s) of the broadcaster.

And then there is the case of cash. Lots of cash. Hard cash, mostly in foreign currency, that would be paid by “Acharya Atal” or his associates to news organisation in a foreign account. And here, too, it seems from the videos that while cash may not be a preferred mode of transaction, it is not an unknown mode.

There are, once again, protocols that seem to be in place to accept cash. Some companies can route it through their own subsidiaries elsewhere in the world, others ask to work with ‘friendly organisations’ to convert the cash into white money.

While the criminal justice system may not have much to work on because the evidence is illegally obtained, the income tax department has no such compulsions. It can call for an investigation based on suspicion. The suspicion stems from this one question that we must pose: “If there is a protocol in place for accepting cash from one entity, how many times before this have news organisations accepted cash and where is the tax on it?”

There is a reason that I have written this piece without mentioning a single organisation apart from Cobrapost in the context of the sting. Because it frankly does not matter. Eight years ago, the Press Council had produced a report on paid news and how it undermined democracy. But, for reasons best known to the Press Council, they buried the findings of their own report. There is an overlap in the names – then and now. But the names in themselves are more for shock value than an actual remedy.

It is not about specific organisations and their systems – rather it is about the process of garnering revenues for news entities. Where do companies draw the line on earning revenues? Should sponsored content run as news? If, so, how should it be labelled so that audiences know it is sponsored? Should this sponsored content fall into the advertising time fixed by TRAI? And what should be the penalty for taking payment in cash routed through foreign sources?

The Cobrapost sting raises many such questions on how media organisations operate. Instead of outraging on the content of the sting, it might be better to fix the deeply non-transparent process of news creation, collation and distribution.

The system is deeply flawed and it is the system that needs to be fixed. That can only happen if there is regulation demanding transparency. Until then hold this space till the next sting.