Shekhar Gupta: Journalism in the time of corona

Covid-19 is the biggest story of our lives and people expect us to be around, watching, reporting, editing, recording this for posterity and blowing the whistle to draw attention to injustices

You have to be reckless, even impertinent and a little nutty to steal the headline of your column from Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The truth is, we journalists are usually all three of these.

If we are also generally forgiven for these flaws and more, it is because people, by and large, know where we are coming from. In so many years, in fact, decades, in journalism, I have never been treated rudely or in an uncivil manner by almost anyone, even those who might have had reason to be angry.

In riots, insurgencies, calamities, election campaigns, we journalists find we