Sometimes only a good old cliché can capture the essence of certain things.

How many times in the past few years, while watching television have we wanted to strangle the anchor (“aap ke saath itna na-insaafi hui hai, aapko is waqt kaisa lag raha hai” or “There has been a gruesome terrorist attack at the IISC in Bangalore, dont go away, we will return to the story immediately after out reporter updates you on Aamir Khan’s wedding which is taking place in the same city). And yet while watching what is perhaps the closest televised strangling of a reporter, it was with a strange sense of pleasure and fear.

The interview that I am referring to is Sagarika Ghose’s of Ram Jethmalani on his decision to defend Manu Sharma. Here is a small sampling

Sagarika Ghose: But as a criminal lawyer, don’t you believe there is a lakshman rekha that even all criminal lawyers have to work under?

Ram Jethmalani: I am sorry. Please don’t talk of this bullshit to me. I know what my lakshman rekha’s are. I have read my rules of the conduct of a lawyer. It will be the saddest day when a lawyer refuses to stand between the state and the final verdict.

Ram Jethmalani: I have told you it’s none of your business—the courts will decide. And for God’s sake, stop becoming judges and Gods. You are over stepping the limits of your duty

Sagarika Ghose: But why don’t you search your own conscience. A young girl was shot in the presence of a hundred people.

Ram Jethmalani: I am searching my own conscience. All this bullshit won’t convince me at all. My conscience is mine and you are not responsible for it. And I don’t sell my conscience either to you or to anybody else nor will I change my professional etiquette because some chit of a girl comes and tells me that something is wrong.

An absolute demolition and indictment of the media, if ever there was one. I guess the fact that the case deals with Manu Sharma of the Jessica Lal case makes us all a little less enthusiastic about this slap in the media’ s face.

But what is really scary however in the interview is the way that the devil of the day-a lustful and loathsome corporate media is pitted against its other- the Courts, the sea of wisdom in which the rule of law sails. So the illegitimacy of the media happens only via the further strengthening of judicial sovereignty; For Jethmalani, the battle for the truth is a battle between the media and the judiciary. Someone has rightly said it is almost impossible to think of battles in the contemporary without being bewildered about where lines are drawn, and what they mean. Stewart Motha for instance accurately describes the battle between Islam and Democracy as a battle between two monotheisms. In India, the battle between the judiciary and the media for the truth takes place at the site of citizenship and the casualties of this battle and its lies are borne by the denizen.

So on the one hand, we have Sagarika Ghosh (self righteous indignance dripping with every syllable) asking “Why me? I am just a voice of the people” and on the other we have Jethmalani’s tirade “You don’t know the rule of the law, you don’t know democracy; you don’t know anything”.

Those who neither have any Faustian contracts, nor can swim very well are in a lot of trouble.