There is little doubt that there is a serious problem with the content of the print and broadcast media in India today. Apart from the fact that more and more time and space of the media is devoted to carrying commercial advertisements, much of the remaining content too has become trivial, inane, and debasing, essentially containing violence, sex and gossip meant to titillate and serve the baser instincts of the audience. Even most news channels and newspapers have been reduced essentially to purveyors of salacious gossip with meaningful news being carried only in snippets and sound bytes. Though the media says that it is merely catering to public taste, the fact is that this kind of content is debasing public taste and values, dulling intelligence and making people more amenable to propaganda. And when this debasement of taste and values is coupled with media consolidation and monopolies, as in the U.S. where just five media companies control more than 90% of all television, newspapers, publishing houses and even movie companies, you have a situation where, as Chomsky says, it is easy to "manufacture consent" and reduce democracy to a farce.
The big question however is: How do you regulate content of the media to prevent such debasement of taste and values? The I&B Ministry has prepared a "Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill 2006" which ostensibly seeks to do that. In seeking to do so, it gives sweeping draconian powers to the government and various executive officers to effectively pre-censor and cripple media organizations. It authorizes the government to "prescribe guidelines and norms to evaluate and certify broadcasting content and the terms and conditions of broadcasting different categories of content by service providers". It also empowers District Magistrates, Sub Divisional Magistrates and other officers to prevent any broadcasts and even seize equipment of broadcasters for violation of the content code or for non certification of broadcast requiring certification. It authorizes the government to take over the control of any broadcasting service during a war or national calamity.
These provisions, if enacted, will make the cure worse than the disease. It will effectively bring back the emergency days, when newspapers had to submit their entire content for pre-censorship and using these powers, the government was effectively able to muzzle the entire media. It has been the universal experience of nations that it is far too dangerous to entrust such sweeping powers of controlling content to the government. Such powers are bound to be misused by the government, which will eventually completely compromise the freedom of the media and reduce them to instruments of the government. These provisions will also violate of the fundamental right of free speech, which includes a free press, and should be struck down as being unconstitutional.
How then does one regulate the content of the media to prevent the debasement of public taste and values and to prevent broadcast of inflammatory content? The penal code has sufficient provisions to allow punishment of persons who publish or broadcast inflammatory content. Those provisions are however rarely invoked to prosecute offenders such as many Gujarati newspapers who fanned the genocide there in 2002 - because they were doing so with the full support and complicity of the Modi administration which controlled the prosecuting agencies. That is why we need to free the prosecuting agencies from the control of the government.
However, regulating prurient, inane and debasing content is a more difficult problem. Authorising the government to do so is certainly not the solution. In order to deal with this, one must understand what is driving such content.
One major reason, in my view, is the total commercialisation of the media where it has come to be driven only by the profit motive and therefore by the advertisers. It is really the advertisement industry which finances and controls the media today. This industry demands content which will easily and quickly grab a greater share of readership and viewership, which can be most easily accomplished by purveying sensational and gossipy content catering to the baser instincts of the viewers. The resultant debasement of taste and dulling of intelligence also suits the advertising industry well, since it makes the people more amenable to propaganda, which is what advertising essentially aims to do.
One solution worth considering would obviously be to empower an independent and fully autonomous regulator/media council, chosen in a transparent manner, to lay down guidelines to regulate content and give it teeth to enforce the guidelines. A more radical solution worth considering would be to provide by law that media organizations cannot be run for profit and cannot carry commercial advertisements. That will ensure that they run only on subscriptions by readers and viewers. That may result in the closure of many media organisations which may not be such a bad thing. But it may also make even those which survive, quite expensive for the viewers/readers and therefore inaccessible to many. Or we could end up having only a few channels and newspapers on the lines of the Public Broadcasting Service in the U.S. But such a scenarip has the obvious need to worry about the media being controlled by Trusts set up by large business houses or media organisations trying to circumvent the ban on advertising by using advertorials and surreptitiously selling news space. These are menaces that confront us even today which we have to deal with.
There are a few salutary provisions in the Broadcast bill however. The provisions to prevent media monopolies by restricting the control of channels and viewership by single organizations and conglomerates is welcome. Though the details of how this should be done can be debated, but there can be no doubt that media monopolies are even more dangerous than government control over the media, and this must be regulated by law. The provisions in the bill to ensure that private channels carrying national sporting events must be obliged to share the feed (without advertisements) with the public service broadcasters is also salutary. This will prevent a situation as we had recently where Doordarshan had to carry the advertising of the private channel in order to show cricket matches. The obligation proposed by the bill to carry 10-15% public interest content is more problematic, for who is to judge what is public interest content. That is bound to lead to unending disputes and corruption in certification of public interest content.
Though government control of content is not the answer to the serious problem of the crisis of content of the media, the time has come to think of a solution to this menace which is slowly devouring the heart and soul of our society.
Prashant Bhushan is a senior Supreme Court lawyer and rights activist.
