Quote, unquote, misquote

The Press has been defined in many ways. Some see it as a rather lofty institution, as a Fourth Estate complementing the other three Estat...

The Press has been defined in many ways. Some see it as a rather lofty institution, as a Fourth Estate complementing the other three Estates of Democracy. Others say it is the only upholder of individual and collective freedoms; the only defence for the otherwise defenceless citizen. But the most contemporary definition of this august institution that8217;s doing the rounds among the Capital8217;s mattering classes 8212; the classes that matter, aka the political classes, stupid! 8212; is certainly more direct and arguably more accurate. The Press is a medium in which one should flog a story or observation in order to court popularity, test the waters or embarrass a political foe and then, when things get too hot for comfort, pretend a You never said what you said b You never meant what you said c Your words were cruelly torn out of context and were completely misinterpreted.

So there is that old, electorally wounded tiger, Bal Thackeray, growling his familiar gibberish in an interview given to his party8217;s very own newspaper, the Saamna. The moment the possibility that he could be arrested for the statements is brought to his attention, the tiger turns pussy cat and clarifies that he didn8217;t quite say what he said and that a crucial 8220;if8221; was omitted from the printed text. Ah, the ifs and buts of political existence! K.S. Sudarshan, RSS chief, deposing before the Liberhan Commission, also discovers that he has been treated extremely shabbily by those funny people with their cameras and notepads. He thunders that the observations he made were not his observations but the observations of somebody else and that the media just ended up having a blast at his expense. As for Uma Bharti, she has been subjected to even worse treatment, it seems. Not only does she claim she has been misquoted on innumerable occasions, she even believes that the media actually concocted all thosewicked photographs of a certain sanyasin smiling a certain smile on a certain day in December 1992.

Dissimulation is an old trick that the world8217;s second oldest profession has long survived on. Being in denial works like a charm. If Kautilya were around he may even have extolled the virtues of just such an approach in his Arthashastra. But what is sometimes perplexing is that even when a comment is made on national television, before the eyes of world, politicians can if they so please deny that they had ever said it. They gamble on the short attention spans, poor memories and fickle minds of the nation and it invariably works. Ultimately, it is the mirror that appears to distort, while the Movers and Shapers move on and shape on. In any case, the relationship between the media and the politician never did run smooth, a situation that Richard Nixon captured so well when he stated wryly at a press conference in 1962: 8220;You won8217;t have Nixon to kick around any more, gentlemen. This is my last press conference.8221; But history has its little ironies. That wasn8217;t his last encounter with the Press, it turnedout. Some ten years later, the Press really did get the opportunity to have him kicked out as the president of the United States.