“To do it faster, be the first, get the scoop. That’s the game”, a young protégé tells her colleague in a scene from Netflix’s Scoop. She prefaces this declaration of a manifesto with the rather naïve assertion that journalists ought not to chase the truth. “For that there is the judiciary and the police”, she says. It’s a debate that devolves into an argument before both peers choose to, distastefully, walk away. Even journalists who claim to anchor and nurture debates can’t bring themselves to have one between them. Ironically, neither is fully right or wrong. Journalism in this series operates out of that grey area between newsgathering and news-making. In Scoop, in print journalism, the colour, tone and taste of the truth varies as facts change hands and faces frantically, it’s hard to tell a scoop from a story. That, precisely, might be the point.
Also read: ‘Scoop’ actor Karishma Tanna: ‘I shadowed a crime journalist to understand body language’
Scoop is based on Jigna Vora’s Behind the Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison. Borrowing from the actual case where crime reporter Vora was accused and imprisoned for conspiracy to murder her competition and senior crime scribe Jyotirmoy Dey, the show is a straightforward trace of events. The veteran journalist was shot and killed by assailants in June 2011. Within days, the compass of the investigation turns towards Jagruti Pathak, a fictional version of Vora played with eerie comfort by Karishma Tanna. Pathak is a typical newshound, working herself out of sleep and mixing life up with work to the point that boundaries become inconveniences. Even while vacationing with her family in Kashmir, she cannot help but chase leads.
Directed by Hansal Mehta, the six-episode season doesn’t overly concern itself with developing characters as much as it observes them deal with monsters that they themselves might have created. Pathak and her editor played by the excellent Zeeshan Ayyub, are dyed as truth seekers but washed in the lust to get that stellar ‘front page’ story. They might look better off than their competitors, who hire and fire scribes for losing out on exclusives, but it is simply because the former look like winners in a losing battle. It’s a race to the rot, and even the good ones are in on the deprivation of a profession that ought to have shown restraint. The news of a senior journalist being murdered in daylight, for example, triggers curiosity but not emotion.
News media is a tough business. In a year when two new media outlets in Buzzfeed and Vice have announced landmarks cuts and closures, there has to be an audit of sorts of where it all went wrong. Scoop might indirectly fit the bill. There is obviously the economy of it all. “Ads run papers, not headlines,” a senior editor screams. While that is a fact, it’s only a part of the bigger picture. Controversies, scandals and salaciousness also run news businesses. It’s something Netflix’s Dhamaka and Zee5’s The Broken News, captured in all its inglorious, vain details serving as post-mortems of the one medium that seems beyond repair – television news.
Mehta’s direction is assured, the performances superlative, including a near-shocking return to the field by Harman Baweja (remember him?) as the senior police officer Shroff. Scoop lacks the heady dynamism of The Broken News and a staunch focus on character like Dhamaka, but what it does convey, is the gradual decline of the very essence of what new-gathering stands for. Pathak, dogged and driven, casually crosses lines which ensnares her in narratives she pretends to, outwardly, fight. Her desperation for scoops at all cost is also in some sense her undoing.
To add to that an entire industry thriving on making messiahs out of mafias ought to have been morally queried but the series stops short of doing just that. We are often fed the narrative that the years of print were far better, but this is a sobering portrayal that argues, maybe even inadvertently, for lesser side of the argument. The greed, lust and fantasy of grabbing a story had outstripped quality as a modest but necessary check of sanity, a long time ago. We have ever since treated everything elusive, provocative as necessary.
The news media business is unforgiving, especially when it is seen through a gendered lens. Pathak has to work harder, and bat against more criticism, compared to her male colleagues. It makes her an underdog but her moral choices, her anguish of missing out on breaks also concur with journalism being a profession of digging up the cadavers of sensationalism as opposed to the antiques of fact. Is it important to get it right, however late; or first, however wrong? Scoop can’t answer these questions for you but by candidly surveying blurred lines of a complex profession that has run itself down the drain of explosive firsts and stunning exclusives, you can at least visualize where the glass starts to look half empty.
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