One of the stupidest arguments used to defend the exclusiveness of a story that wasn’t exclusive at all involved an interview of Salman Rushdie. While the newspaper that ran it as an ‘exclusive’ was not the only publication running a Rushdie interview that day, the defence that this particular story was indeed available only in that paper was intriguingly cheeky. After all, this particular interview, with its particular set of questions, its own set of answers, the interviewer and his style of writing particular to the publication was indeed exclusive in the sense that it could not appear in any other publication. So in a court of law, yes, it was exclusive.
The argument wasn’t bad. And considering that it was my argument, provided as a defence after I was asked by my boss why I had pitched it as an exclusive the previous day, I still feel some sympathy for it. But what that exercise opened up was a question in my head: in these days of crowded news, how much exclusive content can one generate and run on a regular basis? And can one dodge the wrath of the angelic guardians of journalism if one dolls up a normal ‘open’ story and presents it as an exclusive?
A couple of weeks ago, Anand Rangathan had written a fine piece, ‘Mutually exclusive’ in newslaundry in which he noted: “A channel may very well have an ‘exclusive’ but since it appears almost instantaneously on other channels, ‘exclusive’ is rendered as superfluous as a human tail. And herein lies the beautiful paradox of news reportage: a great news story can never be exclusive to the channel that breaks it. Its greatness demands that it be replicated and made to spread forthwith.” (I quite loved that ‘forthwith’ in the end.)
What holds true for television news, holds true for print. But even as we cackle at the sight of the ticker saying ‘Exclusive to CNN-IBN’ and then, upon switching channels, ‘Exclusive to NDTV’ and ‘Exclusive to Headlines Today’ running along the ‘same’ interviews with retired Rahul Dravid or “By the whiskers of Kurvi Tasch!-I-shall-never-retire” General VK Singh, the newspapers have a subtler (sic) game at hand when they play around with the ‘exclusive’ brahmashtra.
If getting a Bofors-sized scoop on a moderately regular basis is a tad difficult these days of too-much news where every PR disc jockey is selling their clients’ information as a scoop and when Wikileaks has decided to tie up only with the venerable Hindu, there are two options open to any ‘exclusive’-hungry editor. Do a costing recce with the editors of Tehelka and buy an assortment of hidden cameras so as to conduct regular ‘sting operations’. With untoward deeds always being conducted by untoward folks in public life, the only thing that exclusive sting journalism of this kind will have to decide on is whom not to expose.
But using the fine muslin of journalistic ethics, sting operations-generated exclusives can be avoided in order to avoid those tricky editorial meetings in which it can become hard to explain why Mr A has been busted while hands should be off Mr B. But as Tehelka nicely – and exclusively – proved in their latest ‘scoop’ showing Delhi-NCR police talking about how women sometimes ‘ask’ to be raped, sometimes the tiny cameras can be focused on the bad Little Guys. Everyone’s happy. Everyone’s newly informed. (Except the moronic cops, of course.)
There is, however, another manner in which to remind the reader of the joys of coming face-to-face with an exclusive news report. That is to bump up a story, any decent story, by slapping it with the exclusive tag. Something that, in my mind, should have been done with a great story that no other newspaper apart from Hindustan Times had – which it decided to play down for reasons, I suspect, that had to do with a too delicate sense of propriety. The news of a large bottle gourd being taken out of a man’s rectum that had been pushed up his anal passage while he was sleeping isn’t quite a Nira Radia tapes exposé that would have de-stabilised the government.
But it was an ‘exclusive’ and it was news.
Two factors that were thankfully taken into consideration when it came to the ‘exclusive’ news two days later about the Special Investigation Team giving its clean chit to Narendra Modi because it found no proof to the allegations by suspended IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt.
Which brings me to the other aspect of ‘exclusiveness’. Do you slap the tag only on news reports that no other publication has? If so, then what becomes of mighty importance is not only whether the story is big or not, but whether the big story is being carried by anyone else. When I had conducted the Salman Rushdie interview, I was told that it was exclusively for little old me. To check on whether that was actually true would have taken up too many phone calls and lie detector tests. So one sure way – if you want to avoid the Tehelka sting model, that is – of getting those regular ‘exclusives’ is to take a normal, non-exclusive good story gained out of an interview, an agency report, a press conference or even a parliamentary proceeding and treat it as a jumping-off point to a treatment no one’s tapped yet.
And I would think it would be wise to be more economical with the ‘exclusive’ tag. Not because of some gentlemanly belief in the sanctity of under-kill, but because the non-habitual reader who is liable to treat the ‘exclusive’ tag as a special treat, may start believing that the non-exclusive servings are tripe and turn the page.
