Abstract
This article explores the moral dimensions of corruption in a region of everyday life typically diametrically opposed to the public—the domestic. I argue that Hindi television journalists cover crime within the family as an event that exposes domestic intimacies as already morally fraught and subject to betrayal, rather than the haven from modernity and westernisation that normative (patriarchal) discourse idealises. This journalistic impetus to expose (exemplified in the sting operation) participates in a larger shift towards televised publicity that scholars of the media in India have documented since the early 2000s. While journalists are motivated by what they see as a responsibility to ‘shake up’ their viewers, they are ambivalent about their role in exposing intimate domestic life as shot through with unease and doubt. Contrary to the censure received by Hindi journalists for their sensational crime coverage, this article argues for greater nuance in thinking through the representational strategies deployed by journalists to expose domestic crime as an event of moral failure. Yet, by focusing on domestic crimes through individuated news events, journalists are unable, or unwilling, to posit a structural critique of the normative family as a potentially violent and unethical institution.
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