Manish Tewari calls for self-regulation in media

Union Minister for Information & Broadcasting Manish Tewari today called for a robust self-regulation in media to “keep out judicial intervention.”

“Content regulation in the media space is not going to come out of political executive, but will come out of the judicial process. Make self-regulation more inclusive and robust to keep out judicial intervention,” he said while speaking at the Red Ink Awards function of the Press Club here.

“With exponential growth in the media space, a paradigm shift has taken place, wherein regulations have to keep pace with changing technologies and have to be universal,” he said.

Tewari said the social media had reshaped the media and in effect there were over eight crore broadcasters in the form of micro-bloggers and twitter and Facebook users.

The Union Minister also observed that the revenue models of Indian media organisations were not well-constructed, which led to the issues of paid news, private treaties, tyranny of TRP, and sensationalism.

Veteran journalist N Ram, participating in a panel discussion, observed that reasonable restrictions were often becoming unreasonable restrictions, and jurisdiction of criminal contempt was posing a serious challenge to fearless journalism.

Journalist Arnab Goswami, moderating the discussion, said media had the right to defend its turf from frequent judicial interventions.

Governor of Maharashtra, K. Sankaranarayanan, conferred the Red Ink Life Time Achievement Awards upon veteran journalists Kuldeep Nayyar and N. Ram. The award for Nayyar was received by his wife Bharti Nayyar.

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