News Channels set up self-regulating Authority

To enforce code of ethics and broadcasting standards, the News Broadcasters Association (NBA), an umbrella body of private news and current affairs channels, acting on the self regulation measures has come up with setting up a News Broadcasting Standards (Disputes Redressal) Authority. The Authority will become operational from October 2.

A nine-member NBA cell will be chaired by former chief justice and former NHRC chairperson J S Verma. Other members representing different sections are historian Ramachandra Guha, former Nasscom chief Kiran Karnik, eminent sociologist Dipankar Gupta and economist and ex-under secretary general of UN, Nitin Desai. The other four members belong to the editors’ category- Vinod Kapri (India TV), B V Rao (Zee News), Milind Khandekar (Star News) and Arnab Goswami (Times Now).

This is the first ever such initiative which will provide public a ‘forum’ to register their grievances over television content. The Authority has been set up as part of the NBA’s commitment to the government that it would regulate itself as an alternative to the long-pending proposal for setting up a regulatory authority for the broadcast sector. Earlier, the NBA drew up its code of ethics and submitted it to the government.

NBA secretary Annie Joseph in a press release stated, "It is a fundamental paradigm of freedom of speech that media must be free from governmental control in the matter of ‘content’ and that censorship and free speech are sworn enemies."

The Authority would assist the electronic media to maintain moral values and journalistic ethics and guide them in the discharge of its constitutional duty, she said. Emphasising the self-governance feature of the Authority Joseph said that “NBA believes that media that is meant to expose the lapses in government and in public life can not be regulated by government, else it would lack credibility.”

Any interference on the part of government irrespective of its well intentioned would however "imperil not just independent journalism, but the very process of investigation itself.”

“It therefore has become imperative that news channels lay down guidelines, procedural safeguards and establish a body that would act as a watchdog and a grievance redressal forum."

After a stern criticism from the Delhi High Court last year when a private news channel was found guilty of stage-managed sting operation which put the “life and prestige” of a school women teacher at stake that followed by the government’s intervention looming over the ‘regulation of news content,’ it was sincerely felt to set up an “Authority”- to enforce code of ethics and broadcasting standards- freed from government’s regulation.