Vir Sanghvi Gets Points for Being Apologetic

By Tripti Lahiri

It generally pays to go second. On Tuesday night, NDTV journalist Barkha Dutt was fairly aggressive with the panel of editors there to quiz her on her journalistic propriety in the wake of the leak of her conversations with lobbyist Niira Radia. The verdict afterwards online (and on India Real Time) was that it was a lost opportunity.

Vir Sanghvi

Hindustan Times columnist Vir Sanghvi benefited from going a day later, appearing from Bangkok Wednesday night on news channel Headlines Today’s show “Centrestage.” Channel executive editor Rahul Kanwal moderated and the program included The Hindu’s editor-in-chief, N. Ram, Open magazine’s political editor Hartosh Singh Bal, India Today editorial director M.J. Akbar, India Today group editor for languages Prabhu Chawla and founder of PR firm Public Relations, Dilip Cherian.
Open magazine was the first to publish transcripts of conversation recorded by the tax department between Ms. Radia, journalists, politicians and others.

Mr. Sanghvi has been criticized for appearing to be willing to shape his column according to Ms. Radia’s suggestions. Mr. Sanghvi has denied that the lobbyist influenced his column and said that she was just one of many sources. (Mr. Sanghvi will be taking a break from his “Counterpoint” column. On his web site, he told a reader it is “entirely my decision.”)
He didn’t accept Mr. Kanwal’s invitation to grovel abjectly. He also asked that he not be “reduced to being judged on the way I massaged a source.”
But he did apologize to his viewers and said they were the ultimate arbiter, not him, and if his behavior looked wrong to them, that was what mattered, not what he thought.
Some bits of the apology were weaker than others. He could have skipped this bit: “I wish to God this had never happened. I had no idea that the process of massaging a source would be tape-recorded.”
He got points but he didn’t get a pass.
Although Mr. Ram liked the style of his response much better than Ms. Dutt’s, he said he was “not convinced at all” by Mr. Sanghvi’s contention that he was just stringing along a source.
“It is not at all right for you to ask someone ‘what should I say?’” said Mr. Ram. “My verdict is the BBC wouldn’t tolerate it, the FT wouldn’t tolerate it, the New York Times would not tolerate it, so why should we not raise the bar? Why should we tolerate it?”
The format of this show was slightly different from Tuesday’s, which was a barely-moderated round-table. On the Wednesday night show, after submitting to a raking over the coals at the start of the program, Mr. Sanghvi was thanked and did not really surface again. The show then became a broader discussion of media and corporate ethics.
Mr. Akbar of India Today was a little kinder than the rest, overall, and focused some of his criticism on the corporate world.
“I’m very, very seriously concerned about sounding holier-than-thou,” he said. “It’s remarkable how much corporate honchos misread Delhi. If they think journalists will decide Cabinet positions, they don’t know how Delhi functions, they don’t know how power functions.”