Ends and means

The Prime Minister needs to be commended for reacting as swiftly as he did to reverse the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s ill-advised move to place curbs on journalists’ access to Central government ministries and officials in the guise of cracking down on ‘fake news’. The now impugned guidelines stipulated immediate suspension of access rights to accredited journalists accused of propagating ‘fake news’ and a permanent ban for repeat offences. Now that the dust has settled on the contentious order, it is critical to understand the issues it raises. To begin with, “fake news”, a phenomenon that strikes at the very heart and credibility of what constitutes journalism, is more worrisome for the media than the political class. In fact, the motive behind much of the so-called “fake” news is to organise opinion that benefits partisan and party interests. Legitimate media has a greater stake in preventing fake news than spreading it. In this context, it is alarming that the Information and Broadcasting Ministry should have considered penalising the media as opposed to consulting with it if the intent was to curb fake news. The implicit assumption behind the move — that the perpetrators of fake news are journalists — is also disturbing. This assumption in itself requires a reiteration of the guiding principles of a functioning parliamentary democracy.

Different democratic institutions, the judiciary and the legislature for instance, have assigned roles that are often perceived to be in conflict with each other. But no one with even a peripheral understanding of how a democracy functions should have any doubt that the individual functioning of these institutions, including the media, is designed in the larger public interest. Journalists filter information with the purpose of not just informing and educating the public but also in order to add to the existing knowledge about whether a policy, event, announcement or statement is for public good. To assume guilt and decide on punitive measures without due consideration not only does the government little credit but raises questions over the motives behind such a move. As the Press Council chairman Justice (retd) Chandramauli Kumar Prasad has pointed out, it is important to make a distinction between inaccurate news and “fake news” which has been created and disseminated with malicious intent.

This requires a deeper understanding of not only the phenomenon of “fake news” but of the dynamics of social media and the Internet. Revoking a poor order was a good first step. But to find a workable solution, all institutional stake-holders need to be involved in the examination of the phenomenon that has profound ethical, moral and technological dimensions.

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