Reporting Live

At a time when investigative journalism is making news, Reporting Live exposes the high cost of illegal sand mining. The sand mafia has deep roots in the institutional architecture, but its corruption is often exposed by stringers and is buried in the inside pages of newspapers until a journalist is mowed down or a whistleblower is burnt alive. Drawing from real events, the film follows Sandhya Yadav (Parineeti Chopra), a field reporter for the Mumbai-based Hindi news channel Azaad Bharati, hunting for a primetime story. Alongside her pragmatic video journalist, Vinod Sharma (Deven Bhojani), she is dispatched to cover an infrastructure disaster in Visargaon, where the sudden collapse of a bridge claims the lives of school children.

As this review appears in a newspaper which has actively led a crusade against illegal mining, there is no denying the relevance of the subject. Or the significant role played by the media in unmasking it. Straight up, ‘Reporting Live’ takes us to a pressing concern: the eviction of fishermen from their ancestral land. In its place, a mall by a builder has been proposed. Reporting the protest and new development plan are journalist Sandhya (Parineeti Chopra) and photographer Vinod (Deven Bhojani) from television channel Azad Bharti. Those clued in on the affairs of television journalism know all too well, it’s anything but azad. Free press is fast becoming a chimera.

Illegal sand-mining continues to be the flavour of the season. Anil Kapoor’s ex-Armyman went up against the ruthless mafia controlling operations in the sepia-tinted hinterlands in Subedaar earlier this year. Now come Parineeti Chopra and Deven Bhojani as the intrepid reporter-camera duo from a TRP-hungry TV network (are there any other kinds?) who confront the bad guys. The nearly two-hour long duration is spent in watching Sandhya Yadav (Parineeti Chopra) and Vinod Sharma (Deven Bhojani) tracking the act itself on the banks of a river, being threatened both outside and inside the workplace, running the gamut of supportive types and unhelpful seniors, going sleuthing in tall unfinished buildings, and other dangerous places.

There are two kinds of Indian journalism movies. Neither of them is nice — which perhaps reflects the state of journalism itself — but it is what it is. The first kind of movie unfolds with the confidence of having spoken to one former reporter as research; it explains the profession like a teacher in third grade because it’s also learning simultaneously. The second kind of movie unfolds with the confidence of having spoken to several reporters from different newsrooms, past and present, so that this research can be reduced to a journalism-for-dummies template; it, too, explains the profession like a teacher in third grade because it thinks that the viewers are learning something they’ve never heard of before.

Inspired by true events surrounding illegal sand mining, Dhruv Tripathi’s directorial debut co-written with Mihir Jadhav means to shed the light on how those wielding power conceal the truth and suppress the voice of dissent to fulfil their ambitions at the cost of human life and safety. Until a pair of daredevil journalists make it their life’s mission to bring out the blatant abuse of power out in the open. Not too many whistleblower stories get told in Hindi films, which would make the premise of Reporting Live an exciting affair. Except shoddy treatment of a serious concern results in a staggeringly bland drama.

At a time when journalism is reduced to either fact-checking or absolute sycophancy hadn’t we become pessimistic enough to jettison that starry-eyed reporter who “fought for the truth”? This constant conscience-invoking journalist, who barges into meetings to give it back to his seniors, who calls their colleagues “cowards” for not chasing a story, who doesn’t flinch even when he is fired, is a unicorn who exists only in the movies. But here me out, I am not saying there are no truth-seeking journalists, there are, but things are not as simplistic as it is shown in Reporting Live. I had to do a massive suspension of reality when I saw a character filing an RTI application in one scene, and getting the answers in the next one.