Ranjona Banerji: Bad journalism to flog fake letter? Or judgment call?

By Ranjona Banerji

There are many embarrassments in the life of a journalist. Let’s face it, the job by nature aligns itself to errors. Some are genuine and some are what we like to term “judgment calls”: a rose by any name you may well argue. For those who thrive on sensationalism, the “mistakes” are deliberate: to slightly twist facts, to mislead with a headline, to focus on one aspect while ignoring the context. To a certain kind of editor, this is what sells and this is what needs to be presented to the “gullible” reader. Because after all, if there are people who genuinely believe in the headline, “Woman gives birth to two-headed goat”, then who is the humble press to disillusion them. Yes, “tabloid” or “yellow” journalism has its place: Usually entertaining, often nasty and sometimes punishable by law.

However, what about errors that spring from a complete absence of established journalistic controls and checks and balances? What happens when editors themselves decide to put information into the public domain without checking authenticity but having no qualms about maligning people? I do not hold with the theory that all television journalism is bad although I have excoriated it enough in these columns.

But, the curious case of the letter about Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose deserves time and attention. Twitter and social media were abuzz this week over a letter written by Jawaharlal Nehru to British prime minister Clement Attlee in 1945 which apparently emerged from the files relating to the freedom fighter, declassified by the government on Bose’s birthday, January 23. Bose’s disappearance, as is well-known in India, has long been a source of controversy and conspiracy theories. The fact that successive governments have refused to release any information has only added to the myth and the dissatisfaction.

It is therefore hardly surprising that a fake letter that has been doing the rounds for six months before declassification should excite people who are waiting for information that would put the Congress Party and India’s first prime minister under murky light.

But is that reason enough for a seasoned television journalist like Rahul Kanwal, joined by Aditya Raj Kaul, to start pushing this fake letter as real on Twitter and Facebook and demanding an explanation from the Congress Party? The letter had many giveaways. For one, Clement Attlee’s name was spelt wrong and so was Nehru’s. What are the odds that Nehru did not know how to spell both his own name and that of the British prime minister? Further, Nehru was not prime minister of India in 1945 and Attlee was not prime minister of “England”. The letter is unsigned. The grammar is appalling. I can understand that people schooled in the RSS version of Indian history, filled with Vedic spacecraft and advanced infertility treatment, know nothing about Nehru but any regular school-going child knows that Nehru studied in the British public school Harrow and at Cambridge University. He also wrote several books. However much you hate him, his English was close to impeccable.

There is more than ideological underpinning that is the problem here, though. It is the rush to get a story out without checking the facts. All Kanwal and Raj Kaul needed to do was sit down and think for 10 minutes. That is, I assume they did not do so. If they did, the situation is truly dire.

As I have understood from social media, Kanwal deleted his Facebook post which had put forward reasons on why the letter was real and Raj Kaul apologised. This was only after historians and the general public explained how the letter was fake, which should in fact have been obvious. Here are details on the website scroll.in:

http://scroll.in/article/802403/twitter-starts-to-mock-fake-nehru-letter-with-fake-nehru-whatsapp-messages

As for the promotion of the fake letter: that was just bad journalism. There can be no “judgment call” excuse here.