Journalistic lapses, not conspiracy

The actions of Delhi Police amount to police excess and violation of due procedure

The police raid on The Wire and its editors last week and the seizure of their phones and computers is excessive and uncalled for, especially in light of The Wire’s own admission of lapses on its part in a series of reports it had done. The reports involved Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the BJP’s IT Cell head Amit Malviya. The reports said that Meta had given Malviya special privileges to take down social media posts that were not to his liking. This was based on an investigation by a team from The Wire that had obtained internal documents of Meta from sources. Meta denied that the said documents were genuine. The Wire had since retracted those reports. It also retracted another report on the so-called ‘Tek Fog’ app as it felt it could no longer vouch for the accuracy of that story as it, too, was written by one of the journalists involved in the Meta story investigation. The raids and seizures against The Wire were conducted on a complaint by Malviya alleging cheating, forgery, conspiracy and defamation. The Wire has, for its part, lodged a complaint against its reporter. A probe should establish whether he was misled by his sources or whether he had himself misled his editors.

Admittedly, the lapses on the part of The Wire’s editors are serious and Malviya is right to feel aggrieved. They failed to exercise editorial checks and balances in this instance. For these lapses, Malviya can seek an apology from them. But for him to allege a conspiracy and for Delhi Police to act on it hurriedly and highhandedly is disproportionate. After all, it was not as if there was no plausible story or element of truth in the leads that The Wire had chased. Before The Wire’s reports the Wall Street Journal had investigated Facebook’s relationship with the BJP; Facebook whistle-blowers had alleged that FB had indeed given preferential treatment to BJP leaders; and at least one Facebook India official who was seen as being close to the BJP resigned in the wake of these reports. So, The Wire seeking to find out how much deeper the story went cannot be called a “conspiracy” to cook up a story that had no basis. Where the editors fell short is in exercising diligence. They also failed to gauge whether they were being lured into a trap. This is a new game wherein the tactics of spying and espionage are being used to lure and trap journalists, a game to which news organisations have to now stay alert constantly.

The actions of Delhi Police – raiding and seizing journalists’ digital devices, and on top of that not giving them the hash value of the seized materials -- amount to police excess and violation of due procedure. In doing so, they breached a key safeguard for journalists and journalism – that of the confidentiality of sources. This is unacceptable. The Wire’s lapses are a lesson for journalists but not one that should be taught by the police committing excesses.