Bachelor of Journalism & Mass communication, Development of Contemporary Media, Censorship & Right to information

1. Censor ship & Right to information
Right to know and inform
Long back, immediately after the world war II US congress had
passed the law about Press’s right to know and inform. How
ever looking at the scenario today this aspect has often come
under strong scrutiny.
Journalist have a full access to public information on the
grounds that public has a right to know. Those who argue
against this, claim that journalists have vested interest. Most
commonly heard argument is that public need not know all.
The basis of this is the feeling that only a few are altruistic
enough to use the information judiciously.
On the other hand those who wish to be selective about
imparting information may be intentionally/ unintentionally
putting themselves on a pedestaland underestimating the
intelligence of the public.
There are some journalists, who are said to file scoops about
film personalities, sportsmen, singers industrialists and other
public figures merely with an aim to sensationalise. They too
have the similar argument that the public has a right to know.
There are times when some journalist lose their sense of
propriety and even judgment of a the degree of sensitivity of a
subject (for example snooping around and reporting in detail
about ongoing investigation about a military operation or
political situation which are vital to maintain country’s security, )
and vital state information which should have been confidential
under the phrase “ people have a right to know.”
At the same time when a sincere reporter or a journalist is faced
with dilemma of making a choice between revealing certain
information which is of vital public interest at the cost of
invading privacy of an innocent individual, “To be or not to
be”( in these cases to say or not to say) becomes the question
which often does not have clear answer.
What ever the case may be it is important to think deeply, as
journalist, whether it is right and absolutely essential and
legitimate to invade another person’s right to privacy, while
championing the right to freedom of expression and speech.
There are certain international laws that are made to protect the
rights of an individual which we shall discuss in detail
The Right to Privacy
There are four different ways that the mass media can invade
someone’s right to privacy. The first is intruding upon a
person’s solitude or seclusion. This generally occurs when
LESSON26
CENSOR SHIP AND RIGHT TO INFORMATION
reporters wrongfully use microphones, surveillance cameras,
and other forms of eavesdropping to record someone’s private
activi-ties. A TV news crew hiding in a van outside your room
and secretly taping your activities while you were inside would
probably constitute a situation of intrusion.
The use of tiny, hidden cameras and microphones by reporters
in their quest for news has raised special problems in this area.
In US,in a 1999 decision, the California Supreme Court ruled
that an ABC reporter committed an invasion of privacy when
she went to work for a psychic hot line and secretly videotaped a

2. conversa-tion with a co-worker. Even though the conversation
took place in an open office and was overheard by others, the
court ruled that the co-worker had a reasonable expectation that
a reporter would not secretly videotape his conversations. This
decision suggests that reporters should give extra thought to
the use of hidden recordings in their news-gathering activities.
The second occasion is the unauthorized release of private
information. A newspaper’s publishing private medical records
that revealthat a person has a dread disease might be an
example in this area. The courts allowed a suit claiming invasion
of privacy to be filed when a newspaper published information
about a person’s sex-change operation without the person’s
consent.
A third method is publicizing people in a false light or creating a
false impres-sion of them. This invasion is most closely related
to libel because falsity is also involved. Some TV stations get
into trouble in this area through the practice Of1 putting new
narration over some stock tape footage, which sometimes
creates a .false impression. For example, a Chicago TV station
was sued when it ran stock footage taken three years earlier of a
doctor performing a gynecological exam with a story describing
how another doctor allegedly used an AIDS-infected swab
during a similar exam. The face of the doctor in the stock
footage was read-ily identifiable and she sued the station,
claiming the story made it appear that she performed the
allegedly negligent procedure. (The station settled the suit outof-
court and paid the doctor an undisclosed amount of
money.)The last means of invading privacy is through appropriation
of a person’s name or likeness for commercial
purposes. This commonly involves stars and celebrities who
find their names or images used without their permission in
some business or promotional activity. Model Christy Brinkley,
for example, successfully filed suit to stop poster stores from
selling her picture without her permission. The not-so-famous
are also protected against appropriation. One man sued because
he found that a camera company had used his picture without
permission in their instruction manual.
Trespass
Trespass,defined as unauthorized entry onto someone else’s
territory, is a concept that is closely related to invasion of privacy.
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DEVELOPMENT OF CONTEMPORARYMEDIA
The close of the 20th century saw a significant increase in the
number of trespass cases brought against the news media.
These cases highlighted a fundamental question for news
reporting. Do journalists have a special First Amendment( Press
Law Passed by US congress) privilege to break the law in pursuit
of a legitimate news story that will advance the public interest?
There have been severalrecent court decisions that suggest the
answer to this question is no.
In one case,a Wisconsin court found that a TV photojournalist
who had entered private property with permission of a police
officer responding to a call was guilty of trespassing. Similarly, a
1999 circuit court ruling found that journalists who enter a
private home with law enforcement officers but without
consent of the homeowner could be sued for trespass. In

3. another case,reporters who followed antinuclear demonstrators
through a fence onto the property of a utility company were
found guilty of trespassing. A related 1999 Supreme Court case
found that law enforcement officers who permit the news
media to accompany them across the threshold of a home
when serving a search warrant were violating the Fourth
Amendment’s provisions against unreasonable searches.
Finally, consider the 1996 case of Food Lion ABC. Reporters for
the news -magazine “Prime Time Live” faked resumes to get
jobs at a Food Lion supermarket and used hidden cameras to
shoot video to document their story. After the program aired,
Food Lion brought suit against the network not for defamation,
but for fraud and trespass. Outside the courtroom,
lawyers for Food Lion explained that they thought the story
was libelous, but they thought they had a better chance of
winning on the basis of the trespass and fraud charges. A jury
found in favor of Food Lion and awarded the supermarket
chain a whopping $5.5 million in damages. A district court
judge reduced this amount to $350,000. Eventually, the circuit
court of appeals dismissed most of the case,but it did uphold
the trespass decision. The original jury awarded Food Lion only
$1 in damages for the trespass,but now that the precedent has
been set, it’s possible that future lawsuits might seek far greater
sums for trespass violations.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright protects an author against unfair appropriation of
his or her work. Although its roots go back to English
common law, the basic copyright law of the United States was
first enacted in 1909. In 1976, faced with copyright problems
raised by the new communications technologies, Congress
passed legislation covering literary, dramatic, and musical works,
as well as motion pictures, television programs, and sound
recordings. The law also states what is not covered. For
example, an idea cannot be copyrighted, nor can a news event or
a discovery or a procedure.
for works created on or after January I, 1978, copyright protection
lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. Works
published before that date are eligible for copyright protection
for a total of 95 years. To obtain full copyright protection, it is
necessary to send a special form, copies of the work, and a small
fee to the Register of Copyrights. The owner of a copyrighted
work can then reproduce, sell, display, or perform the property.
It is important to note that copyright protection extends only
to copying the work in question. If a person independently
creates a similar work, there is no copyright violation. As a
result, one of the things that a person who brings a copyright
suit must prove is that the other person had access to the work
under consideration. Thus, if you contend that a hit Hollywood
movie was actually based on a pirated script that you had
submitted to the company, you must show that the people
responsible for the movie had access to your work. (To guard
against copyright suits, most production companies won’t
open the envelopes of what look like unsolicited scripts.) Note,
however, that you don’t have to prove that someone intentionally
or even consciously copied your work.
In addition, the law provides that people can make fair use of

4. copyrighted materials without violating the provisions of the
Copyright Act. Fair use means that copies of the protected work
can be made for such legitimate activities as teaching, research,
news reporting, and criticism without penalty. The following
factors are taken into consideration in determining fair use:
1. The purpose of the use (whether for profit or for nonprofit
education).
2. The nature of the copyrighted work.
3. The amount reproduced in proportion to the copyrighted
work as a whole. 4. The effect of the use on the potential
market value of the copyrighted work.
Thus, a teacher who reproduces a passage from a long novel to
illustrate writing style to an English class will probably not have
to worry about copyright. On the other hand, if a commercial
magazine reproduces verbatim a series of articles published in a
not-for-profit magazine, it is likely that the copyright statute has
been violated.
Recent cases involving copyright law have dealt with the new
communication media. In what is popularly known as the
“Betamax case,” the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that viewers
who own videocassette recorders could copy programs off the
air for later personal viewing without violating the Copyright
Act. Such taping, ruled the court, was a fair use of the material.
In 1991, a federalcourt ruled that commercial copying companies,
such as Kinko’s, had to get permission from the
publishers before copying and selling copyrighted articles and
book excerpts used for college courses.
The most recent issue concerning copyright la,v has to do with
the Internet. One thing is clear: Copyright laws do apply to the
online world. A 1995 presidential task force concluded that
copying materials from the net is a form of reproduction that is
protected by current copyright laws. What is unclear is what
represents fair use of copyrighted digital material. This question
was at the core of two 2000 court cases that involved digital
music files.
The first case concerned MP3.com. One of the services available
on the company’s website was My.MP3.Com, which allowed
users to listen to CDs that they already owned over their
computers and portable MP3 players. The service worked like
this: The company first copied large numbers of CDs onto its
own computers. Users demonstrated ownership by simply
inserting a CD into a computer’s CD-ROM drive. Once the
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DEVELOPMENT OF CONTEMPORARYMEDIA
company verified that the person had possession of a CD,
My.MP3.Com gave the user access to the music by going to its
database of CDs and depositing an MP3 copy of the CD into
the user’s file.
The five major record companies sued MP3.com for. copyright
violations, c!aiming that the company copied CDs into its
database without permission. The company reached out-ofcourt
financial settlements with four of the five but was unable
to settle with Universal Music, and the case went to trial. A
federaljudge ruled that MP3.com had indeed violated the
Copyright Act and ordered the company to pay Universal up to
$250 million in damages.

5. The other suit involved Napster was that Napster let users
exchange music files directly with the computers of other users.
Unlike MP3.com,Napster didn’t have copies of the music
stored on its computers. Instead it simply acted as a huge
linkage device for its millions of users. Most of the music that
was exchanged on Napster was probably copyrighted material
that the recording industry claimed was being illegally copied.
The record companies, however, could not realistically sue
everybody who used Napster. They did, however, bring suit
against Napster for contributory copyright infringement,
arguing that the service made possible large-scale copyright
violations.
The recording industry scored an early victory when a federal
judge ordered Napster to stop carrying copyrighted material.
This ruling was overturned by ani appeals court, pending a
hearing-a decision that kept Napster in operation for awhile.
Finally, in February 2001, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals ruled that Napster had to prevent users from gaining
access to .copyrighted material. The ruling further ordered
Napster to police its system to prevent illegal file sharing.
Napster officials conceded that the decision may force them to
shut down the service. Other similar file-sharing systems sprang
up to take Napster’s place. It is likely that further legal battles are
ahead.
Obscenity and pornography
Unfortunately, nobody has yet come up with a definition of
obscenity that satisfies everybody. Let’s take a brief look at how
the definition of this term has changed over the years. (If, when
we are done, you are a little confused about this whole issue,
don’ feelbad. You are not alone.).
For many years, the test of whether something was obscene
was the Hicklin rule,a standard that judged a book (or any
other item)in the US by whether isolated passages had a
tendency to deprave or corrupt the mind of the most susceptible
person. If one paragraph of a 500-page book tended to
deprave or corrupt the mind of the most susceptible person (a
12-year-old child, a dirty old man, etc.),then the entire book was
obscene. The standard was written in the 1860s and widely used
for the next 80 years.
In a 1957 case, Roth v. United States,the Supreme Court tried its
hand at writing a new definition. The new test for detecting
obscenity would be the following: whether to the average
person, applying contemporary standards,the dominant theme
of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interests.
(Prurient means “lewd” or “tending to incite lust.”) The Roth
test differed from the earlier rule in two significant ways. Not
only did the entire work, rather than a single passage,have to be
taken into consideration, but the material had to offend the
average person, not simply anyone who saw it. Obviously, this
standard was less restrictive than the Hicklin rule, but fuzzy
spots remained. Should the community standards be local or
national? How exactly would prurient interest be measured?
To gain an idea of the difficulties in this area,consider the
following example of how someone tried to use the strict
language of this test to beat an obscenity charge. In 1966, the
case of Edward Mishkin came before the Supreme Court.

6. Mishkin, who was appealing his sentence,operated a bookstore
near Times Square in New York. The books he sold emphasized
sadism and masochism. In his defense,Mishkin argued
that his books were not obscene because under the literal
interpretation of the Roth test, the books he sold would have
to incite prurient interests in the average person. Since Mishkin’s
books appealed to a somewhat deviant crowd, the average
person, he argued, would not find them lewd. In fact,the
average person would be disgusted and sickened by them.
Therefore,they were not obscene. Wrong, said the Court, and
let his sentence stand.
The next few years produced more obscenity cases to plague the
High Court. Other decisions added that the material had to be
“patently offensive” and “utterly without redeeming social
value” to be obscene. During the 1960s, the Supreme Court
began considering the conduct of the seller or distributor in
addition to the character,of the material m question. For,
example, even if material was not considered hard-core
pornography, it could be banned if sold to minors, thrust
upon an unwilling audience, or advertised as erotic to titillate
customers. A 1969 ruling introduced the concept of “variable
obscenity” when it stated that certain magazines were obscene
when sold to minors but not obscene when sold to adults.
By 1973, so many legal problems were cropping up under the
Roth guidelines that something had to be done. Consequently,
the Supreme Court attempted to close up loopholes in the case
of Miller v. California. This decision did away with the “utterly
without redeeming social value” test and stated that the
“community standards” used in defining obscenity could be
local standards, which, presumably, would be determined by
local juries. The new test of obscenity would include these
principles:
1.Whether the average person, applying contemporary
community standards,would find that the work as a whole
appeals to prurient interests.
2. Whether the work depicts or describes in a patently offensive
way certain sexual conduct that is specifically spelled out by a
state law.
3. Whether the whole work lacks serious literary, artistic,
political, or scientific value.
Despite this new attempt, problems weren’t long in coming.
The language of the decision appeared to permit a certain
amount of local discretion in determining what was obscene.
The question of how far a local community can go in setting
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DEVELOPMENT OF CONTEMPORARYMEDIA
standards continues to be troublesome. The Supreme Court
has since ruled that the motion picture Carnal Knowledge was
not obscene, even though a state court said that it was. The
Court has also said that Screw magazine and the Illustrated
Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and
Pornography were obscene no matter what community’s
standards were invoked. The Court further clarified the third of
the Miller guidelines in a 1987 case,when it ruled that judges
and juries must assess the literary, artistic, political, or scientific
value of allegedly obscene material from the viewpoint of a

7. “reasonable person” rather than applying community standards.
These issues could be decided with the help of experts
who testify about the value of a work. The first two guidelines,
however, will still be decided with reference to contemporary
community standards.
In 1982, the Court ruled that laws banning the distribution of
pornographic materials involving children were not violations
of the First Amendment. The Court ruled that a state’s interest
in safeguarding the physical and psychological well-being of
children took precedence over any right of free expression. If it
strikes you as somewhat bizarre that the members of the
highest court of the United States have spent considerable time
plowing through publications like Screw’ magazine and looking
at such movies as Deep Throat to come to this decision, you are
not alone.
Over the years,the Court has taken a somewhat more lenient
view as to what constitutes obscenity. The Miller case suggests
that the Court is encouraging the states to deal with the
problem at the local level. Given the long history of controversy
that surrounds this topic, however, it is unlikely that this
predicament will end soon. In fact, the whole issue surfaced
again in 1986 when the Justice Department released a report on
pornography. The report, which had strong political overtones,
called for more stringent laws concerning pornography. One
such law, the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act,
took effect in 1988.
More recent problems have concerned the Internet. Child
pornography is ille~ gal on the Internet just as it is in other
media. The 1988 act noted above specifically mentions computers
as one of the channels where this illegal material might be
circulated. Sexual “stalking” over the net is also prohibited. In
an effort to keep pornographic material from children, Congress
passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996. Part of the
act made it illegal to use a computer to create,solicit, or transmit
any obscene,lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent communication.
The Supreme Court eventually found the act to be
unconstitutional and ruled that the Internet should be given
the highest level of First Amendment protection, similar to
that given to books and newspapers,rather than the more
limited rights of broadcasting and cable, where regulation is
more common. The Court noted that even though the
government had a legitimate interest in trying to protect children
from harmful content, this interest doesn’t justify broad
suppression of mate-rials directed at adults.
A second attempt at protecting children from pornography also
ran into legal difficulty. The Child Online Protection Act
required commercial websites to require proof of age before
delivering material that might be harmful to minors. In 2000,
an appeals court upheld an injunction that blocked implementation
of the act, ruling that the act raised serious First
Amendment problems.
In our country too Press and Broadcasting laws have undergone
vital changes and the recent which are being discussed on
international and national forums, is that India media is as free
as media in any other part of the world. Let us discuss in
detail/

8. Recent Broadcasting laws lawin India
The book, Broadcasting Reformin India, edited by Monroe E.
Price and Stefan G. Verhulst. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press,1998 deals elaborately on the new broadcasting laws in
India. Here are some excerpts.
The debate on the reform of Indian broadcasting and on the
constitution of a broadcasting system free of government and
market controls began as early as 1964 with the Report of the
Chanda Committee. This was followed by the Verghese
Committee in 1978, and finally the Joshi Committee in 1984,
though the last was primarily concerned with the promotion of
indigenous television software rather than with the re-structuring
of broadcasting institutions.
The focus of attention in this recent study is the Broadcasting
Bill (1997) which was introduced in Parliament in April 1997,
but which three years on has lost much of its relevance due to
the convergence of broadcasting, telecommunications and
computer/digital technologies. The Bill sought to establish an
autonomous Broadcasting Authority of India (BAI) for
facilitating and regulating broadcasting services in the country. It
spelt out details on licensing procedures for terrestrial, cable,
satellite and DTH channels, the extent of foreign equity to be
permitted, cross-media ownership, and uplinking services for
private satellite channels.
The Bill made it mandatory for all channels, whether Indian or
foreign, to transmit their programmes from Indian territory.
Licenses would be granted only to Indian companies for
satellite channels though these companies would be permitted
to have up to 49% foreign equity. No foreign equity for
terrestrial channels would be allowed. Further, it banned crossmedia
ownership (newspaper publishing houses could have no
more than 20% equity in television or cable companies).
Besides, no advertising agencies, religious bodies, political
parties or publicly funded bodies would be granted a license to
own a television broadcasting company. Direct-to-home (DTH)
services would be licensed only to two companies after a
bidding process.
Separate bills for broadcasting (terrestrial, cable, and satellite),
telecommunications and Information Technology which have
already been drafted are likely to be consolidated into a single
comprehensive bill on the legislation of technology. Indeed, the
draft of such an all-encompassing Bill is currently under
discussion in the various ministries in New Delhi, and according
to the Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Arun
Jaitley, in a recent interview with CNBC (‘India Talks’), will be
introduced in parliament soon.
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DEVELOPMENT OF CONTEMPORARYMEDIA
Broadcasting Reformin India is a contribution to an emerging
branch of international comparative law that, as the editors
note, is in its infancy. ‘It is about how to use models and how
to misuse them, how to compare legal structures and how not
to compare them, especially those relating to the media’. The
book had its origins in a seminar conducted by the Centre for
Media Studies, New Delhi, in June 1996.
The volume is divided into three parts. Part I provides the

9. historical backdrop for the analysis of the current debates on
broadcasting policy. Sevanti Ninan, Nikhil Sinha and Rishab
Aiyar Ghosh sketch the developments in Indian broadcasting
law over the last fifty years in painstaking detail. They tell the
story of the persistence of the various governments and
political parties in promising reform, but not being able to take
the final step in getting it through parliament. Ninan puts the
debate on the broadcasting bill in historical perspective, while
Sinha analyses the impact of globalisation on Doordarshan as a
public service broadcaster. Ghosh, in a rather strident tone, calls
for the privatization of the airwaves to all and sundry.
The Indian Telegraph Act of 1895, drawn up and imposed
rigidly by the colonial government, continues to this day to rule
the airwaves. The Act gives government exclusive control of all
postal and telegraphic services, telecommunications, broadcasting
and even the digital transmission of information.
Part II brings together six chapters on the Indian Broadcasting
Bill (1997) and comparative media law. The Bill looks at models
of broadcasting legislation in other countries, especially of the
western democracies. The Chinese, Singapore and Malaysian
models were rejected out of hand since they were not in keeping
with India’s democratic traditions. The American model too
was not favoured. The one most favoured was the British
model. Hence the discussions are within the framework of
international broadcasting law, with particular emphasis on laws
in western democratic countries.
Of special interest is Mark Templeton’s ‘human rights perspective’
on the Broadcasting Bill debate. It’s a perspective that has
been largely overlooked in the debate. He argues that both the
Indian Constitution and the International Convention on Civil
and Political Rights (ICCPR) underscore the fundamental
human right to seek,receive and impart information. While
Article 19 of the Indian Constitution states that ‘all citizens
shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression’. The
Supreme Court’s decision on the Hero Cup (1994) declared that
this right includes ‘the right to educate,to inform and to
entertain and also the right to be educated,informed and
entertained’.
The ICCPR,which was ratified by the Indian government in
1979, however, goes further. It states that ‘everyone shall have
the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include
freedom to seek,receive and impart information and ideas of all
kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print,
in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice’
The Broadcasting Bill had its origin in the concern of the Indian
government about the possible ‘cultural invasion’ of crossborder
satellite broadcasting in the early 1990s. The satellite
broadcasters like Star TV clutch of channels beamed their
programmes from outside the Indian national territory, and
without any kind of permission as was required under the ITU
regulations. The Bill seeks to regulate the ownership and
concentration as also the kind of programming of these
satellite channels, severalof which are now owned by Indian
and non-resident Indians.
Templeton points out three vital principles that the Broadcasting
Bill infringes from a human rights perspective. The first is

10. Section 21 of the draft Bill which criminalizes the reception of
‘unauthorised’ signals. Thus, a person who watches a satellite
service that is not uplinked from Indian soil could be punished
with imprisonment. This interferes with the rights of viewers
to seek and receive information, ‘regardless of borders’.
Secondly, ‘the draft Bill appears to give the Sate a backdoor for
regulating access to the World Wide Web’. The Bill gives the
Broadcasting Authority the right to regulate services which
transmit audio, visual or audiovisual programming ‘irrespective
of the means of delivery of that service’. Thirdly, ‘ a human
rights perspective leads one to ask if it is appropriate to prevent
whole classes of persons from owning and operating broadcast
stations. These classes of persons (in Schedule 1) include
political groups, religious groups, advertising agencies, and
foreign individuals and companies.
Several satellite channels (both Indian and foreign) are known
to be affiliated with some religious or political group or other.
For instance, the Maharishi Channel is evidently a religious
channel promoting TranscendentalMeditation and Vedic
Hinduism and disdain for other religions, and Sun TV and
Eenadu TV are channels of political parties. The Communist
Party (Marxist) of Kerala is to launch the ‘Malayalam’ channel;
so is a Catholic Church group in Kerala to beam the Jeevan
Channel. Further, the Jain Channel is closely associated with the
Bharatiya Janata Party,the leading party of the ruling national
coalition.
Nothing in the Broadcasting Bill is going to change the political
or religious colours of these channels. Many of them are
uplinked from outside India; regulating them is as problematic
as regulating the western transnational channels. Restrictions
have little meaning as has been the case with the Cable Regulation
Act; barely 20,000 out of the more than 50,000 cable
networks have registered themselves with the postal authorities
as is obligatory under the Act. Laws which will be adhered to
more in the breach are not worth enacting in haste.
Part III is an invaluable compilation of the complete texts of
the Prasar BharatiAct (1990), the Broadcasting Bill (1997),
committee reports, minutes of various ministries, and the
Supreme Court’s verdict on the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting vs. Cricket Association of Bengal case (1994). But
the panic created among multinational players in Asian satellite
television when the Broadcasting Bill was debated gave rise to
hectic lobbying in the form of alternative surveys /reports. The
first was a report brought out by the International Market
Assessment (India) Pvt. Ltd; the second by Phillip Spector,
Patrick Campbell and Marcia Ellis for the law firm Paul, Weiss,
Refkind, Wharton and Garrison (the Paul Weiss document).
The Paul Weiss survey was conducted on behalf of the
multinationals which formed themselves into the ‘American
Business Council Working Group on the Broadcasting
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DEVELOPMENT OF CONTEMPORARYMEDIA
Industry’. It is well known (and this was reported widely in the
business press in India) that the American and British ambassadors
did their own frantic lobbying with the Information and
Broadcasting Ministry at the time the Bill was to be tabled in

11. Parliament.
The Paul Weiss survey was submitted to the Joint Parliamentary
Committee entrusted with the task of fine-tuning the Bill.
The survey appears to be a matter-of-fact catalogue of broadcasting
law in 13 countries in the areas where the Indian
Broadcasting Bill imposes restrictions and licensing. But as the
editors themselves admit (p.77): ‘The Survey is studiously
factual and carefully objective but is also an advocacy document
prepared at the behest of third parties seeking to yield changes
in the Broadcasting Bill. It is an advocacy document of a
particular kind; it is premised on the notion that accurate
information will be a more effective form of argument than
impassioned rhetoric’. The two editors, incidentally, were
consultants to the study.
Part II thus brings together Western perspectives on the Indian
attempt to reform broadcasting law to reflect what is happening
in the sphere of comparative international law. Tony Prosser
offers a British perspective on the Bill, and Maria and Pietro
Vagliasindi take a close look at the economics of auctioning, and
the Auction Provision of the Bill.
The debate on the Bill has been overtaken by the rapid developments
in the digitalisation of broadcasting and transmission
technologies, especially in audio and video ‘streaming’ technologies
which deliver radio, television, music and data to desktops,
palmtops, personal digital assistants,mobile telephones and
even wrist watches. The regulation of communication technologies
has become a nightmare for governments the world over.
It was sheer luck, for instance, that helped the New Delhi police
to eavesdrop on conversations between cricketers and bookies
(the ‘match-fixing’ scandal) that led to the sacking of South
African cricket captain, Hansie Cronje. The role that cricket and
other sports have played in influencing broadcasting policy
worldwide, and the Broadcasting Bill in particular, is discussed
by Scott Bouvier (Chapter 9). Sports events are major revenue
earners for broadcasting networks worldwide; it is no surprise
therefore that national broadcasters maintain an exclusive
monopoly on matches played on their soil. Doordarshan is no
exception. Since 1 April 2000, the Prasar BharatiCorporation
has been granted autonomy even in the management of its
own finances.
The crass commercialization of public service broadcasting in
India in recent years is thus likely to be further stepped up, as
the competition for revenues from advertising toughens, what
with more than 56 channels in English, French, German and
various Indian languages, offering their services around the
clock. This aspect of broadcasting reform in India has been
dealt with only in passing in the present volume. Yet,it remains
a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion on broadcasting
law in this country and other democracies struggling to
legislate so that in the final analysis, broadcasting serves the
public interest and the people’s right to inform and to be
informed.
Review by Keval J. Kumar, Director of the Resource Centre for
Media Education and Research,Pune,India.
To have a good and deep insight into the broadcasting laws of
India,I strongly recommend this book be read in great detail..

12. SelfRegulatory measures
Here are some regulatory measure which you may follow in
order to be a successfuljournalist:
1. Try to uphold the respect and dignity of a person you are
interviewing . Times of tragedy and death are difficult
circumstances where the journalist has to strike a balance
between bringing out the truth and extreme ruthlessness
(many times in bad taste) in asking questioned
2. follow the golden mean rule- that is the middle way relative
importance and fairness must be given to two sides involved
in a story of breaking of news
3. Remember to aim for the larger good instead of giving into
mere sensationalism. It may sell but seldom makes you go
on in a long run. Sometimes certain decision may hurt a
small group for example in investigative journalism against
corruption of government but must be reported for the
larger good.
4. Lines between ethical and unethical is blurring hence it
important to work from the inner value of justice and
fairness.
Emerging media themes
Politics and economics have always dominated Indian Media
and I think they will continue to do so like the rest of the
world. After all in a democratic society, politics economics and
social issues are of prime concern and are rightly given importance.
In a developing country like ours, social issues like
women rights and the rights of a girl child have also been
discussed continuously at various forums including media.
These issues are assuming greater dimension with the opening
of economy and globalization . Opening of economy and its
impact on the countries social fabric is also discussed on a major
scale
With India making giant strides towards globalization, its
emerging relationship with Developed and developing countries
is another topic of pondering and discussion. While many
business and technical journalists are specializing on the
country’s advancement in the field of science, technology,
engineering and Bio-technology, apart from defence and other
areas.
Refernces-
1. Davis, Anthony; Magazine Journalism Today; (1988); Heinemann
2. Baird, Click; Magazine and Production; 4th edition
3. Mogel; The Magazine
4. Anderson, Douglas;
Contemporary Sports Reporting; (1985); Nelson-Hall
5. Melkote, Srinivas; Communication for development in the third world; (1991); Sage
6. Ed. Glasser, Theodore; The idea of Public, Journalism;(1999); Guilford Press