Professional journalists and editors need not have read our poststructuralist philosophers of performativity to understand that representing an event in public, especially an event of violence, can also mean participating in that very event. They learn about these limits to representation from their peers, from company policy and remembered precedents, or from experience. In some recent work, for example, I wrote about an unusual event wherein a vigilante who was wanted by the police for murdering Gokulraj, a young Dalit man, was interviewed on mainstream broadcast television news on three different occasions via Skype in 2015—this was while the police were unable, or perhaps unwilling, to apprehend the fugitive (Cody 2023: 137–151). The vigilante was the leader of a group devoted to upholding the ‘honour’ of their dominant caste by ensuring that women from this caste did not enter into romantic relationships with men from the Dalit community. The murder that the vigilante was accused of, and eventually convicted for, was the latest in a series of horrific ‘honour killings’ that had been made to look like suicides, which had gripped the public imagination (see Srinivasan 2025; Rajangam 2016). Yet it was unusual because the alleged murderer in this case had become a renowned personality. This news spectacle of interviewing the killer on television was not only propelled by the compulsions of communicative capitalism but also broadcast in the name of shaming the police force into arresting the murderer. It was widely condemned by Dalit activists and some fellow journalists for providing a stage to a figure of caste hatred.