NEW DELHI: Legal luminaries on Saturday remembered late senior advocate Ram Jethmalani and discussed pros and cons of trial by media during the first lecture memorial series.
Attorney General K K Venugopal termed Jethmalani a warrior of corruption and said, “He was a fighter for corruption and filed so many PILs and cases against it.” SG Tushar Mehta said, “Media trial is a topic close to Ram’s heart. Nobody would have blasted the media like Ram. At the same time, he was the darling of the media.”
Pointing towards the violation of norms in media, senior advocate Kapil Sibal said, “Today the media has reincarnated itself into a public court. They do not just make suggestive innuendos but direct allegations. And some of them even instigate violence. Unless media becomes a standalone business, which is uninfluenced by the government, we will not be able to save the fourth estate from the nosedive.”
Senior advocate Harish Salve said, “The problem starts when media becomes a parallel system of rule of noise and the rule of noise starts displacing the rule of law. Indian judicial system in high profile cases have become a circus. Media does not believe in any thing called law of evidence. Trial by court of law has been replaced by trial by embarrassment.”