New Delhi: Television news channels are still undecided on how to go about dealing with the advisory issued to them by the government, on coverage post the Mumbai terror attacks.
Their meeting scheduled for today to take a decision on the Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s advisory - which asked them not to show gory scenes, replay the tragedy and not to show India as a demoralised nation - could not take place.
The channels’ industry body - News Broadcasters Association (NBA) - refused to comment on the issue.
In the light of two written and one oral advisories sent to news channels by the Ministry over their last week’s coverage of Mumbai terror attacks, the NBA had held a meeting yesterday, where it had decided to raise the issue with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while rejecting the advisories.
“It was decided that apart from meeting the PM over the issue, we had also decided to reject the advisories of the ministry, and also reached a consensus that all future decisions would be taken united by all the NBA constituents,” an industry source told, adding that NBA was supposed to respond to the advisories by today.
However, it failed to meet, and the NBA secretary general Annie Joseph when contacted for her reaction to yesterday’s decisions, said, “I don’t want to comment on it (advisory), there has been no such decision regarding the advisory by us.”
Even television channels refused to comment on the advisory saying that NBA was their representative body, which is authorised to comment on the issue.
The ministry in its advisory had advised news television channels that “gory scenes should not be shown, and tragedy should not be replayed”.
Asking them to practice self-regulation, the advisory also said that “media is a harbinger of peace and normalcy and should not promote ‘insecurity’.
News coverage pertaining to the event should project that India is not demoralised and has risen, despite all terrorist attacks as normalcy has been restored.
It should project that India is a global power which has full support of the international community”.
In fact last evening also a senior official from the ministry called up main representatives of Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF) - another industry body - expressing concern about news being broadcast by channels over threat perception to important airports.
Though today’s meeting turned out to be a non-starter, industry sources said that they would address the issue in a major way “in near future”.
