Back To Emergency?

There is little doubt that there is a serious problem with the content of theprint and broadcast media in India today. Apart from the fact that more and moretime and space of the media is devoted to carrying commercial advertisements,much of the remaining content too has become trivial, inane, and debasing,essentially containing violence, sex and gossip meant to titillate and serve thebaser instincts of the audience. Even most news channels and newspapers havebeen reduced essentially to purveyors of salacious gossip with meaningful newsbeing carried only in snippets and sound bytes. Though the media says that it ismerely catering to public taste, the fact is that this kind of content isdebasing public taste and values, dulling intelligence and making people moreamenable to propaganda. And when this debasement of taste and values is coupledwith media consolidation and monopolies, as in the U.S. where just five mediacompanies control more than 90% of all television, newspapers, publishing housesand even movie companies, you have a situation where, as Chomsky says, it iseasy to "manufacture consent" and reduce democracy to a farce.

The big question however is: How do you regulate content of the media toprevent such debasement of taste and values? The I&B Ministry has prepared a"Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill 2006" which ostensibly seeks to dothat. In seeking to do so, it gives sweeping draconian powers to the governmentand various executive officers to effectively pre-censor and cripple mediaorganizations. It authorizes the government to "prescribe guidelines and normsto evaluate and certify broadcasting content and the terms and conditions ofbroadcasting different categories of content by service providers". It alsoempowers District Magistrates, Sub Divisional Magistrates and other officers toprevent any broadcasts and even seize equipment of broadcasters for violation ofthe content code or for non certification of broadcast requiring certification.It authorizes the government to take over the control of any broadcastingservice during a war or national calamity.

These provisions, if enacted, will make the cure worse than the disease. Itwill effectively bring back the emergency days, when newspapers had to submittheir entire content for pre-censorship and using these powers, the governmentwas effectively able to muzzle the entire media. It has been the universalexperience of nations that it is far too dangerous to entrust such sweepingpowers of controlling content to the government. Such powers are bound to bemisused by the government, which will eventually completely compromise thefreedom of the media and reduce them to instruments of the government. Theseprovisions will also violate of the fundamental right of free speech, whichincludes a free press, and should be struck down as being unconstitutional.

How then does one regulate the content of the media to prevent the debasementof public taste and values and to prevent broadcast of inflammatory content? Thepenal code has sufficient provisions to allow punishment of persons who publishor broadcast inflammatory content. Those provisions are however rarely invokedto prosecute offenders such as many Gujarati newspapers who fanned the genocidethere in 2002 - because they were doing so with the full support and complicityof the Modi administration which controlled the prosecuting agencies. That iswhy we need to free the prosecuting agencies from the control of the government.

However, regulating prurient, inane and debasing content is a more difficultproblem. Authorising the government to do so is certainly not the solution. Inorder to deal with this, one must understand what is driving such content. Onemajor reason, in my view, is the total commercialisation of the media where ithas come to be driven only by the profit motive and therefore by theadvertisers. It is really the advertisement industry which finances and controlsthe media today. This industry demands content which will easily and quicklygrab a greater share of readership and viewership, which can be most easilyaccomplished by purveying sensational and gossipy content catering to the baserinstincts of the viewers. The resultant debasement of taste and dulling ofintelligence also suits the advertising industry well, since it makes the peoplemore amenable to propaganda, which is what advertising essentially aims to do. 

One solution worth considering would obviously be to empower an independentand fully autonomous regulator/media council, chosen in a transparentmanner,   to lay down guidelines to regulate content and give it teeth to enforce theguidelines. A more radical solution worth considering would be to provide by law that mediaorganizations cannot be run for profit and cannot carry commercial  advertisements. That will ensure that they run only on subscriptions by 
readers and viewers. That may result in the closure of many media  organisations which may not be such a bad thing. But it may also make eventhose which survive, quite expensive for the viewers/readers and therefore inaccessible to many. Or we could end up having only a few channels andnewspapers on the lines of the Public Broadcasting Service in the U.S. But sucha scenarip has the obvious need to worry about the media being controlled by Trusts set up bylarge business houses or media organisations trying to circumvent the ban on advertising by using advertorials and surreptitiously selling news space.These are menaces that confront us even today which we have to deal with.

There are a few salutary provisions in the Broadcast bill however. Theprovisions to prevent media monopolies by restricting the control of channelsand viewership by single organizations and conglomerates is welcome. Though thedetails of how this should be done can be debated, but there can be no doubtthat media monopolies are even more dangerous than government control over themedia, and this must be regulated by law. The provisions in the bill to ensurethat private channels carrying national sporting events must be obliged to sharethe feed (without advertisements) with the public service broadcasters is alsosalutary. This will prevent a situation as we had recently where Doordarshan hadto carry the advertising of the private channel in order to show cricketmatches. The obligation proposed by the bill to carry 10-15% public interestcontent is more problematic, for who is to judge what is public interestcontent. That is bound to lead to unending disputes and corruption incertification of public interest content.

Though government control of content is not the answer to the serious problemof the crisis of content of the media, the time has come to think of a solutionto this menace which is slowly devouring the heart and soul of our society.

Prashant Bhushan is a senior Supreme Court lawyer and rights activist.