Electoral money power is hurting media's credibility

NEW DELHI This is not the first time that we have lost face in Haryana.

- ALOK MEHTA

In the Lok Sabha elections held immediately after the Emergency, take out the files of old newspapers of Delhi and many states and see.

The news of the wave in favour of Congress and Indira Gandhi kept getting printed as the lead on the front page of so-called national newspapers. A major strategist associated with the Congress party's campaign was my journalist friend. He used to say how many thousand rupees were being given to some selected journalists going to the constituencies from Delhi for their travel, according to their tickets, facilities and status. Naturally, the headline would be about the victory flag. The climax was that two weeks after the huge defeat of the party and Mrs Gandhi herself, the bureau chief of a big newspaper called my strategist friend and said that he had spent Rs 12 thousand more on the election tour and should return the money. Another journalist had sent a letter threatening to stage a sit-in in front of his house if he was not paid Rs 20,000 due for the work done for preparing the election campaign material. My friend almost cried and said, "Tell me, even then I had only given the names of some people to the party treasurer and advised him to provide the necessary funds. Now from where will I get the money from the defeated party?" By the way, even before that, around 1974, during the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly elections, we used to get information from the same friend about printing the party's press release as news in an envelope with Rs 100-500.

But then there was no electronic media, social media like today.