Bitter And Alone: Scoop Draws Gripping Light On Life Of Ambitious Female Journalists

Hansal Mehta's Scoop tells the story of a female journalist and everything she faces in her successful career. Scoop hits all the right angles to unfold what it is to be a female journalist, especially in the crime beat usually dominated by men.

The series brings to light the misogyny ingrained in the system, the sexism women face, and how the system can bring down strong-minded women. Scoop is the story of Jigna Vora, a former crime journalist, accused in the murder of Jyotirmoy Dey, a contemporary of hers. The series is an adaptation of Vora’s memoir, Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison. 

The series sketches the murder of Jyotirmoy Dey and how Vora was framed under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA). The six-episode series co-written by Mrunmayee Lagoo Waikul and Mirat Trivedi revisits the brutal murder of 2011, and while doing so, it unfolds all the aspects of Jigna Vora's life visualised as Jagruti Pathak played by Karishma Tanna in the series.

Scoop Review

Jagruti is a divorced single mother living with her family in a small flat with her son in a hostel. Like any single mother, she is &t=6s">divided between family and her work life. Here she loves her job as a crime reporter. Jagruti is a sincere yet badass woman with contacts in the police force, court, and underworld. Jagruti is seen as a smasher of stereotypes, her success rattles the men around her, but her traits become her enemy as they always brought judgments. However, Jagruti stays unaffected until her arrest. 

From dealing with harassment in prison to battling character assassination, she goes through it all, and that is where it all starts bothering her.

Vora's story precisely shows the struggle of female journalists and what they go through in daily life. There were times when police officers make advances towards Vora, it is unimaginable how it might be for other journalists. The series consciously addresses men sabotaging women's progress, getting jealous, and discrediting a women's hard work.

In the series, Pushkar, a colleague of Jagruti calls her success a compromise with her boss. On the other hand, Pushkar tells his wife to stay strong, who is undergoing malice for being promoted. But later even questions his wife's capability and ends up asking if she flirted or slept around. These subtle events echo a larger message of the system calling women's progress a mere shortcut.

The series is not very glamorous, it has canvased life the way it was structured in the book. The story is authentic, the emotions are real and have feministic depth. Jagruti emerges as an unapologetic mother, who says sorry to her son for not spending time with him but refuses to feel guilty. She is a mother who thinks for herself too, that's the example we women want to set up. She cannot escape prejudices in jail either, struggling to prove her innocence, she is taunted as a 'gangster's mistress'.

Overall, from start to end, it seems people involved in her arrest were removing their own vendetta, her only crime was being a woman and journalist. 

The series simultaneously also addresses the sensationalising of news, putting the accused on media trial, and the rat race of getting exclusives. It makes so much sense in contemporary times because the series does make a point by showing the stark contrast between newsrooms. Better the newsrooms, worst the journalism. The best part of the series is it makes no one hero, there is no victory in the end, just despair.

In the end, Jagruti too ruminates over her deeds, and her work as an ambitious journalist. "Being an ambitious journalist wasn't a crime. Nor did I have anything to do with Sen's murder, but I have murdered journalism for sure," she confesses to one of her cellmates.

The characters in the series call for sensitivity in journalism. The series may seem a detailed version of Vora's jail time, which sometimes becomes overbearing, but it rightly captures the vulnerability of the protagonist. The whole mix of prison, courtroom drama and newsroom drama, non-fictional crime, and investigative journalism makes it a story of a person's life. 

Views expressed by the author are their own

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