Sharing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's concerns about the professional responsibilities of journalists, the Editors Guild of India has constituted a committee to address the issue. The committee, headed by veteran journalist Ajit Bhattacharjea, will submit its report in eight weeks, an Editor Guild's statement said yesterday.
The committee is mandated to propose specific measures to enhance the credibility of the media," the statement said, adding that the guild shared the Prime Minister's concerns related to professional responsibilities of journalists. Critical of the reports that led to the recent upheavals in the stock markets, Singh had wondered on Saturday whether there were professional codes of conduct to address these challenges.
How many mistakes must a journalist make, how many wrong stories, how many motivated columns before professional clamps are placed? How does the financial media deal with market moving stories that had no basis in fact? Investors gain and lose, markets rise and fall, but what happens to those reporters, analysts, editors who move and make the markets?’’ he said at the silver jubilee celebrations of Chandigarh Press Club.
In the race for capturing markets, journalists have been encouraged to cut corners, to take chances, to hit and run,’’ Singh remarked. I believe the time has come for journalists to take stock of how competition has impacted upon quality.’’ Singh was referring to the turmoil in the stock market on Thursday last after reports that the Prime Minister had a meeting of senior officials of SEBI, RBI, CBI and IB to deal with phenomenal rise in penny stocks. The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) had denied subsequently that there had been any such meeting.
The Prime Minister’s Media Advisor Sanjay Baru wrote to the editors of the newspapers saying they could have been misused by motivated persons to move the market.’’ This is the first time that an agency in the Government of India has asked any newspaper to conduct an enquiry and apprise the Government of the results of the enquiry.
Last week, the Sensex dipped considerably following reports that the PMO had summoned intelligence officials on the subject of the stock market surging ahead. This report coupled with some routine investigations had an immediate impact on the stock market. Fears were expressed that there may be a recurrence of the Harshad Mehta episode of a decade ago when the stock market crashed.
