Many of us are fed up with the endless toxicity on news channels these days. Switching the television set off doesn’t help. The vitriol spills over to social media which we carry with us on our phones all the time. One of the latest targets of social and news media has been Deepika Padukone.
Media seems to be drunk on its newfound power to bring down rich and famous celebrities. All that the media has had to do for the purpose is to name and shame them. It’s as if the media does not need to wait for the law to take its course. It’s as if they have suddenly found out that they are above the law.
Is the media above the law?
In a way, they may be. There is no real regulation on media in our country. So far, they have self-regulated. There is a certain code of ethics that the media of our country so far swore by. But now, they seem to have denounced the ethics of journalism. They were the agency responsible to check and balance the powers of the State. And now, we are in a position that we need a check and balance mechanism against the media itself.
But regulations for the media may or may not come by soon. So, is the freedom of the press going to override all other rights of the citizens of this country?
I say it can not. And I say there’s no one better than a celebrity like Deepika Padukone to prove it to the news media. She has the resources and she should use them to bring the media to justice. And she should do this even in the scenario that the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) finds her guilty of any drug-related offence.
Half-truths of the media are complete lies
Deepika Padukone making the news media accountable is important. The media has confounded issues in the minds of the general public. The media has led people into believing incorrect positions of law. The public now seems to believe that one who violates any drugs-related law cannot get the benefit of other laws. And this belief seems to be based on half-truths published by the media.
Clear laws exist to define what acts constitute an offence in relation to drugs. But some of the media has chosen to not make the laws clear in their entirety to the audience. The media has chosen to become builders and influencers of public opinion, but they show no concern about how ill-informed that opinion may be. The media has exposed the private chats of individuals. And they have portrayed that they have acted in national/public interest by doing this. But the media has kept its audience ignorant of a fact. The fact is that the media have flouted the law which protects the privacy of those individuals.
Does Deepika Padukone have the right to privacy?
The right to privacy is part of the fundamental rights of Indian citizens. This was unanimously held by a 9-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India in 2017. So, an individual can take even the State to Court for the invasion of their privacy. Remedies against private entities are of course available in common law/the law of torts.
There certainly are limitations to this right. So, the NCB may not be said to have violated Deepika’s right to privacy. That is assuming that the NCB employed legal means to pull out her private chats to investigate.
But the media channels who flashed those messages stand in violation of her right. The fact remains that the messages were ‘leaked’ to the news channels presumably by the NCB. The messages had not yet become evidence in any case registered against Deepika. As such, they were not yet public records. So, the news channels cannot claim immunity on the ground that they published a public record. In the race to break exclusive news, the news channels acted a tad too soon for their own good.
Also, the NCB already was in possession of the chats when the news channels published them. Clearly, the channels did not ‘unearth’ these messages by a feat of journalism. They also did not serve any real ‘public interest’ by publishing these messages. In fact, they may have prejudiced an ongoing investigation.
What the media has done has undermined its own role in the functioning of our democracy. That’s far from serving any national or public interest. Or is ‘national interest’ the new cover-up term for ‘vested interests’?
Yes, Deepika Padukone can sue the news media
Deepika Padukone is now entitled to file a suit for damages against these media houses. The legal ground is the invasion of her right to privacy. And she will have this ground even if the NCB investigation leads to evidence against her. Because her right to privacy is not conditional upon her compliance with all other laws. Or on a clean chit from the media or from the public. Thankfully.
Very aptly put Neha, we surely need a strong media but now days they have gone totally crazy without any sense of responsibility.
I agree with Right to Privacy which you mentions in your article Neha. I think Deepika is paying for speaking up , when she took stand in JNU. Things have become very difficult now a days …Ordinary people like us have to be so careful before speaking and Media , i have just given up on them.
I had read somewhere Kapil Sibal saying that Courts must never forget that their commitment to the cause of liberty and our constitutional values will be judged not by their words but by their actions in dealing with causes .