In his Oscar-winning role as Lt Col Frank Slade, the blind, misanthropic war veteran with a motor-mouth and free-flowing urges in Scent of a Woman, Al Pacino provides sage advice to all of us via his pet cat, “When in doubt, fuck”.

As delightful as Col Slade’s remedy for confusion may be, may I suggest a far less colourful and more plodding way of dealing with doubt? Get hold of more facts.

As journalists – irrespective of their hormonal levels – know only too well, their job is to deal with facts. Even those in the analysis and commentary business need a bowl of reliable facts to bake their cakes. So whether it’s uncovering them, disseminating them, stringing them up to form a cogent picture, or even twisting them around to match a thesis, the journo is essentially an information scavenger. Doubts appear to the reader or viewer when one of two things happen:

a) When he doesn’t believe the fact being presented

b) When he is not provided with the facts, leaving gaping holes to pour whatever one fancies in them.

The first category of doubt stems from a bias that is either the result of previous facts encountered that run counter to the latest one, or the reader/viewer being a “believer” who, come what may, can’t handle the truth he finds so unpalatable. A sub-category of the “believer” is the vested-interestwalla. If a politician from a certain party is found caught with his hand in the till, his supporter, even as he knows that his man can’t dodge the bullet, will keep denying, denying, denying.

Two incidents, separated by distance and levels of ‘national importance’, took place last week and were dutifully brought to our notice by the information hunter-gatherers.

Let’s take the more ‘important’ incident first. Twenty people deemed to be “Maoists” were killed in an operation conducted by security forces in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma and Bijapur districts – two killed in the former encounter and 18 in the latter – late on Thursday night. While the authorities told the media that the “forces were going to bust a Naxal training camp…[and] they met resistance”, counter-claims were made by local residents that the encounters were “fake” resulting in the murder of innocent civilians, including minors.

Just to show how far we have travelled from the National Films Division newsreels and All India Radio broadcast days of rubber-stamped journalism – most of the coverage across the media also recorded the doubts aired over the security forces’ version of what happened in Chhattisgarh on the night of June 28. The encounter killings in Chattisinghpora, Pathribal and Barakpora in Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag district in 2000 – especially after the CBI’s statement to the Supreme Court in March this year that the killing of seven people (in Pathribal) by army personnel “were cold-blooded murders and the accused officials deserve to be meted out exemplary punishment” – was a doorstopper moment in Indian journalism’s ability to not take everything being stated by the authorities as gospel truth.

However, stenography as journalism is still alive and there are various reasons for this. A media organisation, like many consumers of information, can be blindly worshipful of the State. The sanctity invested on the army is reflected by blindly believing what it always says, resulting in some cases as a willing suspension of disbelief regarding any wrong committed by the armed forces – which is usually aired in the quasi-governmentspeak of “not bringing down the morale of the armed forces”.

Then there is the paradox of the “beat reporter” whose access to his sources and stories depends on how “cooperative” he is with those who provide him information in the first place. This, in my experience, is more of a self-censoring exercise that fears the oxygen of information being cut off at its source than a real sado-masochistic source-journalist relationship. But I may be generalising as there are various kettles of fish, piranhas included, out there in the pond that the information-gatherer has to wade into. As for far too many reporters covering the police or armed forces beats show, stenography is alive and well.

But let’s not get all-Arundhati Roy here. Just because the big bad authorities can say little sweet things to cover their tracks doesn’t mean that they’re always up to big bad things. True, the power of information dissemination is nearly always loaded in their favour for the simple fact that a police press conference is far easier to attend than to seek out the views of an accused.

But as The Hindu’s Chhattisgarh correspondent, Aman Sethi, amply displayed, all that is needed is to present the facts as faithfully as one can in the smog of different accounts. The fact that The Hindu’s reports mentioned that “several of the bodies seen by this correspondent had bullet wounds in the torso and the neck” – targeting above the waist, as opposed to parts of the body below the waist as mandated by security force norms – proves or disproves little. But it certainly adds a layer to the information gathered about the killings that didn’t and won’t come up in the official press briefings.

The victims in Bijapur and Sukma may or may not have been Maoists/Maoist sympathisers/shields for Maoists, but we do get the unimpeded fact courtesy a quote of a security force personnel involved in the operation that “if we really wanted to, we could have razed the entire village”.

But there’s the vacuum of facts that one also has to deal with. A few days after the Chhattisgarh killings, a 50-year-old resident of Delhi by the name of Babbu was sentenced for a crime he had committed eight years ago. In 2004, Babbu was arrested for possessing four “obscene” books. After a trial that lasted over eight years, this week he was sentenced by a Delhi court to a week in jail and Rs 1,000 as fine only after Babbu finally pleaded guilty.

“It is noted that the convict has faced trial for eight years for possession of only four books containing the objectionable content and is also advanced in age…. The court finds it imprudent to commit him to imprisonment”, the judge is reported to have declared in the reports.

As for the nature of the “obscene” books? Not a word about them except that there were four of them with Babbu. Boy, the things that are left to our doubting imagination!