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Barkha Dutt, the 38-year-old star reporter and anchor of the biggest English-language cable news network NDTV, is sometimes called `Oprah Winfrey of India.’ However, she is increasingly being criticized by many, and is proving to be an embarrassment to her media colleagues since late November, as she was caught on tape talking to a corporate lobbyist, Nira Radia. In her taped conversation, Dutt agreed to pass messages to the governing Congress Party to get Andimuthu Raja, a DMK politician from Tamil Nadu at the center of a telecommunications scandal and suspected of corruption, reappointed as telecommunications minister.
The calls, taped by tax investigators in May 2009, have exposed a world of deal making and information brokering in New Delhi. Copies of the tapes were leaked to the news media and published two weeks ago in India’s `Open Magazine’, and `Outlook.’
The tapes give an impression that Dutt was acting as a power broker; she vehemently denies the charge. She says that she was simply stringing along a news source who had access to information on a fast-moving story and that in any case, she never passed on the messages.
Dutt, daughter of female newspaper reporter, Prabha Dutt, says that she has been unfairly made to answer for the failings of a whole industry; this is true. The electronic news media is being regarded as a great success story all over the world, including in South Asia. However, the clout that many of the journalists appearing on television start having gradually starts to influence their personalities. As some would say, the power goes to their head and they start considering themselves invincible. Many of them even start regarding themselves as the king-makers who can make or break people. Dutt may be on this `power-high’ while talking to a lobbyist on the phone.
God knows if Dutt ever charged Nira Radia the lobbyist for getting her favorite installed as the telecommunications minister or planned to do so but one thing is for sure: she was showing off her power to the lobbyist. And she is now rightly paying the price for this.
No doubt media plays a vital role in exposing corruption in any country but there are a few cases of anyone exposing the corruption within the media. If anyone ever makes this mistake, the media suddenly gets united and reacts as happened when the members of the Punjab Assembly recently passed a resolution deploring the behavior of a few media outlets; the same assembly under intense media pressure within a week passed another resolution eulogizing media’s role.
The situation is not much different in India but the treatment being currently meted out to Dutt shows that there are a few sane voices in the media establishment who are willing to stick their neck out to save the reputation of the whole institution. The Hindustan Times discontinued her weekly column, along with another journalist Vir Sanghvi, who was also involved in the scandal. The Delhi Press Club early this month experienced quite some fire-works when a journalist remarked that fellow journalists were jealous of Dutt and were thus targeting her. Many got up to object and shouted that they were not corrupt, and did not subscribe to the concept of `chummy relationship between the press and the powerful’ and that they should not be clubbed with the tarnished one.
Dutt says that ''at a moment when the public gets anxious about the state of the Indian media, I am suddenly made to answer for everybody else." This is the price one pays for being India’s Oprah Winfrey and for showing-off her clout to others. 
Anees Jillani is an advocate of the Supreme Court and a member of the Washington, DC Bar. He has been writing for various publications for more than 20 years and has authored several books.
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