Whose scoop is it anyway?

The controversy over the scooping of the report began with India Today’s Executive Editor and author of the scoop’, Prabhu Chawla, giving himself a self-congratulatory pat. The India Today issue with Chawla’s story titled Exclusive Damning Revelations’ on the cover, hit the stands on November 9, a day after Star News went to town with it on the basis of a press release from the newsmagazine picked up by the news agencies. Comments a rather satisfied Chawla: “As the leading magazine, we have to lead the rest of the media.”

Well, he did lead Star News into thinking it was this year’s biggest story, but others beg to differ, especially regional-language journalists, who view it as a classic case of their Delhi peers not being able to see beyond their noses. They say this may be the first instance of the author of a scoop telling everyone within earshot that it is one.

TV journalist and newspaper commentator Rajiv Shukla says he broke the story in The Sunday Observer of September 28 after a 15-minute peek at the interim report. In the story titled DMK indicted in Rajiv’s killing’, Shukla covered all the points that India Today broke’, or so he insists: Muthuvel Karunanidhi’s role; Chandra Shekhar’s culpability; the severe strictures against the Intelligence Bureau; the panel’s support for Rajiv Gandhi’s decision to send the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka; and the examination of the LTTE’s involvement in Rajiv Gandhi’s May 1991 assassination.

Even he, however, appears to be a late starter in this war of claims. Sudhangan, Executive Editor of The Indian Express Group’s year-old Tamil newsmagazine, Tamilan Express, presents the strongest claim to being the original parent of the story, which appeared on August 27, a day before Justice Milap Chand Jain handed over the report to the Home Minister.

He also offers documentary proof, in the form of photocopies of the most crucial pages of the report which his magazine reproduced on August 27, to buttress his claim. The magazine detailed with great accuracy the DMK’s nexus’ with the LTTE. And it followed the story up in two subsequent issues. Naturally, Sudhangan has reasons to be upset that even The Hindu, which being based in Chennai should have known better, chose to credit the story to India Today. Now, the newsmagazine has put ads in major local dailies proclaiming: “What we propose, others second.”

But in what is becoming an intriguing case of Me-First, yet another contender has surfaced, armed with an equally authoritative clutch of clippings. Dismissing India Today’s claim as absolutely wrong, R. Rajagopalan, New Delhi Bureau Chief of the Telugu daily Vaartha, says that on September 21 he had reported LTTE politburo member Kansi Anandan’s testimony to the Jain Commission, which is part of the interim report. “And on October 16, we reproduced documents highlighting the Commission’s conclusions on the growth of Sri Lankan Tamil militancy in Tamil Nadu,” Rajagopalan says. “The story was headlined DMK sympathetic towards LTTE’.” Interestingly, even the tabloid Blitz has been reporting on the report the latest, which beat India Today by a day, was headlined Jain explosion on the cards’.

A more serious contender, though, is Newstime’s New Delhi Correspondent, Rajiv Sharma, who says he has been at the story since August, even before the report was presented to the Home Minister. He even has a chronology of his journalistic coups, starting on August 19, when he reported the indictment of Karunanidhi, V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar, to October 20, when he wrote on the LTTE’s involvement in the assassination under the headline, A Permanent Menace’.

Sharma is quite forthright about his own pre-eminent position. “All I can say about India Today’s claims,” he says, “is that Mr Prabhu Chawla did not have time to look at Newstime. Had I been writing something significant, I would have at least verified my facts first.” Part of the reason why there was little reaction to the Tamilan Express expose (authored by a freelancer writing under the pen-name Sharath) is the bias against the regional media, says Sudhangan. He is bitter that even the The Hindu has fallen prey to this elitist’ mentality.

Observers also point out that Chawla should have known what his southern compatriots had written, considering that he is also the Executive Editor of India Today’s southern editions. (Tamilan Express, with is circulation of 90,000, incidentally, is a serious rival of the more-established Tamil edition of India Today — circulation: 1,11,000.)

The other major complaint is the one Sharma has with the Hyderabad-based Eenadu Group to which Newstime belongs. Says he: “I asked my editor why we hadn’t been more vocal about our stories and was told that we at Eenadu don’t trumpet ourselves.” That is something Shukla still kicks himself for. “I should have released the essence of my 1,000-word story to the agencies,” he says. That, clearly, is where India Today scored.

The newsmagazine triumphed in its news management, getting the story on to the agencies by Saturday morning. It was just in time, before others managed to lay their hands on the documents or parts of them. It helped that the magazine, in trouble with its rival Outlook snapping viciously at its heels, had improved its distribution network this issue onwards. India Today will now hit the stands on Sunday, not Monday.

Having generated so much heat, which is timed well to embarrass an increasingly adrift government — and perhaps enable both the BJP and Congress to come up smelling of roses — Chawla appears unfazed. He compares the story to a UFO, which was sighted everywhere, but landed ultimately at India Today. And he scoffs at the charge of political motivation. “This is a document which is going to be placed on the floor of the House on November 19,” he says. “Our only motivation was to be the first with the news.”

Chawla has an instant analysis for the entire story behind the story. “It is like the trial of a murder case,” he says. “Much has been written for long on the evidence. But the judgment itself is news.” His message is clear. Let the others down south complain about their upcountry brethren always looking to steal the spotlight, but India Today will always have the last word on every subject, even if it is the last to do so.

For the media world, though, the story underlines how better marketing and packaging can take news’ places. Even as India Today successfully used the national reach of the news agencies, its television arm, TV Today, got into the act by devoting much of this Saturday’s Newstrack, telecast on Star Plus, to the scoop’.

The new questions it raises on the ongoing cross-media relationships debate are perhaps academic at the moment. Also, the rival claims in what promises to be an enduring hack-world controversy for a long time may never be settled. But the controversy will keep the press clubs and the other media watering holes around the country excited for days to come. The one thing you can say with certainty is that as scoops go, this one was unprecedented in more ways than one.