Phone tapping has always been a contentious issue in politics but this is probably the first occasion when tapped conversions have been leaked into the public domain. This must have let the cat loose amongst the pigeons and forced people (who use lobbyists) to be extremely concerned about loss of their privacy. However, this is the first case that has come out in public domain about a lobbyist being put under surveillance by the government. It is an open secret that all the top business houses use political lobbyists and the top lobbyist are well known in political, business and media circles. To start with, Lobbying in India is invariably disguised as PR, Media Management, Communication and Consultancy. The real details on the spectrum scam are in the remaining 5,000-plus recordings that haven’t yet come out in the open but will become public at some point of time.”
Union home secretary G K Pillai says, “The 100-odd tapes that are now public have nothing to do with the ongoing probe into the 2G scam case. Although, the Government has initiated an enquiry into the leaks, it is a foregone conclusion that the leaks were deliberately planted by the ruling Congress Party to send out a strong message to certain individual and parties that it is in the possession of the ammunition needed to fix them if they went against Congress. We must bear in mind that the leaked tapes represent only 10 hours of recording from the total of 2000 hours of taped conversation available with the Government. Having missed out on a juicy “Breaking News” opportunity, they didn’t want to continue to fight a losing battle and tried to cash in on the fall out news. Once the old media realized the futility of the black out, they slowly started to come out of hiding. Response of Hindustan Times was more subdued which published Vir Sanghvi’s response on its website and not in the main news paper. NDTV threatened to take “appropriate action” for defamation. NDTV too came out in her defense and tried to put back the blame on OPEN Magazine and its editor Manu Josef who first published the story.
#Barkhagate hashtag become the symbol of emergence of the new media and end of the era of doctored news coverage.īarkha Dutt tried her best to put up a brave face by responding to the mob fury over Twitter and Facebook. While the press and media initially tried to black out the news, presumably to protect their fellow journalists, the alternate media, most notably Twitter and Blogs, thwarted these plans. Involvement of top journalists, Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi, has raised an unprecedented outrage, especially in the Indian internet community, which has in the last few years emerged as an alternate media. Radia Tapes have kicked off a huge controversy over the role of the media and has raised a question mark over the impartiality of the Fourth Estate.
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