Client No. 9 and his media enablers

BY s r ramanujan| IN Media Practice | 13/03/2008

There is no harm in unfettering our imagination for the purposes of a comparison. Let us assume that one of our chief ministers is caught pants down in a brothel. (Highly unlikely that  anyone will have the nerve to catch him in the act, but let us suppose, nevertheless.) How will our libidinous CM cover his tracks?

Step 1 :  The Director General of Police will be summoned and asked to immediately suspend or dismiss the lower level cop who was asked to raid the brothel houses. If there is a fear of his spilling the beans, ¿finish¿ him.

Step 2: The  DGP will be given a tongue lashing with a warning of transfer to an insignificant post in case his compliance is less than enthusiastic.

Step 3 : The  State Home Minister will also be summoned and warned that any leak about the episode to the Press or the Opposition would see him out of the cabinet.

Step 4: The Home Minister will also be told to ensure that the woman with whom he was caught is not seen on this planet any more.

Step 5 : Even after all these precautionary steps, if the media is able to sniff out things, there will be a flat denial with the added protestation that he always sees divinity in womanhood and that all this tamasha is the creation of his political rivals to unseat him.

Not that what happend to the New York Governor is such an unlikely scenario here. Many chief ministers have had concubines, or extra marital affairs. A former chief minister of a northern state who is presently a governor, disappeared on his way from Delhi to his home state and after a week or so he was found having fun in a shady place. Neither were people outraged,  nor was he terribly embarrassed.

This is how the Indian chief ministers and their servile investigators would have behaved if caught in the act. Now let us see what the New York Governor Eliot Spitzer did when the startling revelation came that he was patronizing a prostitution ring and was himself a celebrated client of the ring.  How the federal investigators went about their job should be a lesson for our CBI. More than that, how Spitzer conducted himself should be a lesson for all those who believe in decency in public life. Two days after media blitz, the disgraced man gave in with grace not before exposing the media¿s role as his "enabler" in his previous assignment as attorney general of New York.

 Eliot Spitzer, who resigned on Wednesday as governor of New York, was found to be a frequent client of a prostitution ring and according to the prosecution records he was "client no. 9", probably a code for the governor. The recent episode when he  took a prostitute to a Washington hotel on Valentine¿s Day was his undoing and the whole racket came out in the open. The sex racket was busted with the help of bank officials and the federal police and the New York Times website was the first to report the sex scandal on Monday.

On the very same day, Spitzer appeared before the media and admitted that he failed to live up to his own standards. He also apologized to his wife,  and family for his personal failings. In his resignation speech on Wednesday, he said: "I am deeply sorry that I did not live up to what was expected of me…Over the course of my public life, I have insisted, I believe correctly, that people, regardless of their position or power, take responsibility for their conduct. I can and will ask no less of myself. For this reason, I am resigning from the office of governor". With his wife by his side as he was making this statement, he struck a personal note. "As I leave public life, I will first do what I need to do to help and heal myself and my family". An Indian chief minister facing such ignominy will never disappear from public life in the first place, instead he would have taken recourse to the five steps given above. And if he does disappear after all this, an electoral victory will wash off all his sins to enable him to resurface in public office.

Interestingly, Spitzer¿s public profile prior to the scandal was quite contrary to the image that he has acquired now. According to the Wall Street Journal, he portrayed himself as the moral avenger. He was the slayer of the big guy, the fat cat, the Wall Street titan – all allegedly on behalf of the little guy. Time magazine called him "crusader of the year" for his role as the former New York Attorney General in prosecuting prostitution rings and exposing malfeasance and shady dealings on the Wall Street. Paradoxically, he fell victim to his own personal failings to borrow his own words.

How Spitzer was caught is an interesting story which could never happen in the Indian context. A New York bank found Spitzer¿s bank dealings were suspicious and they filed Suspicious Activity Reports with the Treasury Department which in turn swung into action. The transfer of funds was linked to a company related to pornography web sites. It was the bank reports that tripped up Spitzer setting in motion the federal investigation which finally identified him as a client of a high-end prostitution ring. What was admirable was that the federal investigators were never enamoured of the power and position of Spitzer and went about their job with utmost professionalism. In fact, they took pride in "knocking down" a most popular public figure. Contrast this with the role that our own CBI played in probing the Bofors deal!!

What came under critical scrutiny, like Spitzer himself, was the role of the press. The Wall Street Journal came out with a scathing opinion piece on "Spitzer¿s Media Enablers".  "Journalists have spent the past two days asking how a man of Mr Spitzer¿s stature would allow himself to get involved in a prostitution ring. The answer to my mind is clear. The former New York attorney general never believed normal rules applied to him, and his view was validated time and again by an adoring press. "You play hard, you play rough, and hopefully you don¿t get caught" said Mr Spitzer two years ago. He never did get caught, because most reporters were his accomplices….from the start, the press corps acted as an adjunct of Spitzer power, rather than a skeptic of it"

The WSJ columnist recalled how the Washington Post compared Spitzer to no less than Teddy Roosevelt and the Atlantic Monthly hailed him as "a rock star" and the Democratic Party¿s future. According to the columnist, "what makes this more embarrassing for any self-respecting journalist is that Mr Spitzer knew all this, and played the media like a Stradivarius."