New Delhi: The Mumbai Press Club has expressed “grave concern” at the Maharashtra government’s decision to set up a ‘media monitoring’ centre that will keep a tab on news coverage related to the state government across print, electronic, social and digital mediums.
“In the guise of controlling the spread of misinformation and mistaken reporting, this move amounts to imposing a regime of surveillance,” the Mumbai Press Club said in a statement on Saturday.
The Government Resolution on the media monitoring centre says that it will be classifying news as either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. “With no definitional clarity, there’s a real danger of any criticism of the government and its policies being dubbed as negative information and further conflated with misinformation. Thus every criticism or critical reporting can be conveniently labelled as misinformation,” the Mumbai Press Club has said.
“Moreover, such a classification of news as negative and positive can be seen as an attempt to profile and target the voices critical towards the government. It is also an act of not-so-subtle messaging to the media to refrain from publishing so-called negative information. This implies an intrusion into the media’s role of reporting the reality as it is, whether it be construed as negative or positive by the powers that be.”
“An even deeper flaw with this scheme is the government assuming the role of arbiter of truth to itself. We would like to remind the government of Maharashtra that a similar attempt by the union government to amend IT rules to form a Fact Checking Unit (FCU) to identify “fake and false” content against the government on social media platforms, has been struck down by the Bombay High Court. The grounds for striking it down were the infringement of the right to freedom and the fear of a “chilling effect” amounting to censorship,” the statement continues.
“When much of the news is bound to be about the government and its policies, the government itself being the arbiter of its veracity comes across as a brazen conflict of interest. Rather than arrogating to itself the unchecked authority to proclaim what is truth and what is not, the government would do well to muster up the courage to face the truth which at times is bound to be inconvenient.”
