Sometime during the premiere of the new season of Bigg Boss last Sunday, a contestant, Mandana Karimi, was asked how she’d react to the male attention she’d receive inside the Bigg Boss house. “Will you enjoy it – or would you want to steer clear of it?”

Karimi, according to Wikipedia, is an Iranian model and actress with a few insignificant cameos in Bollywood to her credit. Which means she will probably take to Bigg Boss like Devdas to alcohol. Before you wander off to do a Google image search of Mandana Karimi: the question that we began with.

So, who came up with the cerebral question, you ask?  Would you enjoy the male attention?  Just like would you enjoy the free sauna bath that you get as compensation for being held hostage in a house for weeks? Couldn’t be Salman Khan, surely? Why, Saurav Sharma, Senior Executive Producer and anchor of India TV, of course. No, he hasn’t been fired by Rajat Sharma yet – but seems to have made a seamless transition to reality TV from what was news but is strikingly cumulative to reality TV. He was on Bigg Boss as part of panel of “senior” journalists, adding intellectual gravity to the show. The other journalists in the panel included ABP News’ Dibang and Shweta Singh, Executive Editor, Special Programming, Aaj Tak.

Apart from these “senior” journalists, there were also three more not-so-senior-ones who featured in the show. They were not in the studio, but in a setting that seemed to resemble an unrealistically well-organised and peaceful press conference.

I find it curious that the country’s most entertaining show should have so many journalists. But it probably is, as a friend pointed out, just a telling remark of how journalism is viewed these days: full of fluff.

Before you think I’m a boring cultural snob who thinks Bigg Boss is beneath me, trust me I am far from it (the cultural snob bit, at least): Tip Tip Barsa Paani is my favourite song. However, what bothers me is that fact that media houses think it’s dandy for their journalists to engage on a platform like Bigg Boss but are uncomfortable with the idea of journalists discussing journalism on a platform like Newslaundry or The Hoot or other media critique platforms or shows. More often than not, these discussions entail a bunch of journalists discussing a story and exchanging notes on it, which can only enrich journalism and everyone can benefit. However, the management policy of most news organisations makes journalists weary of such engagements.

Undoubtedly – and I’d readily admit it – this emanates from the personal suffering of someone reporting (or pretending to at least) on the media. I have been to umpteen press conferences and book launches where reporters from reputed news organisations (including the ones who had representatives on Sunday’s episode of Bigg Boss) have refused to answer our most harmless questions. Not because they didn’t want to but just because “company policy” refrained them from doing so.

I can claim from personal experience reasonably confidently that journalists do want to speak – and many of them do, but inevitably on a “strict condition of anonymity”. Once, while pursuing a story on that inexplicable figment of Right-wing imagination known as Love Jihad, I was generously helped by reporters who wanted the truth to be out. They provided me transcripts of phone conversations, screen shots of text messages and other crucial details about how the story was planted. None of them, though, wanted to be identified, because their job was at stake.

Another time, Newslaundry had to can an interview with a fairly well known TV anchor after it was recorded. The anchor was petrified the interview would piss her boss off and she’d end up losing her job.  Funnily enough, it was the most vanilla interview ever – and had hardly anything that could possibly endanger her job. But we don’t want people fired over nothing. We are nice people that way.

Yet another time, a newspaper journalist was too scared to put across her version in a story I was doing on her report (yes, we often do meta stuff). The story, as it appeared in print, seemed misreported, but she had a more-than-plausible explanation defending her position. In fact, after speaking to her I was convinced that the story was not wrong at all – and people on social media had jumped the gun. However, she insisted that I shouldn’t put out her side of the story, as her editor would be upset that she spoke to me.

Whether we like it or not (we don’t, of course), Indian journalism is in the middle of an intense credibility crisis. Senior central government ministers call us “presstitutes”  – and, more people than we’d like to accept, think it’s fair.  To be sure, it’s not. But the almost institutionalised culture of being unwilling to be available for scrutiny is instrumental to this distorted public perception of the profession.

Bigg Boss is great and almost as entertaining as television news. However, it is doing just fine with wannabe actors and failed models. Journalists, though, have a more pressing job at hand: regain our credibility. The nation, truth be told, doesn’t really want to know from us anymore. That will happen not on the sets of Bigg Boss.  For that, media houses should let their journalists engage with their audience and be more open to critical examination.  Peer review is an effective way to achieve that objective. It involves a set of journalists sitting around a table and discussing how a story was done – and how it could have been done. The table’s ready. Hopefully, managements of media houses will be too, soon enough.