The first known journalistic product was a news sheet circulated in ancient Rome: the Acta Diurna, said to date from before 59 bce which recorded important daily events such as public speeches and was published daily and hung in prominent places. In India the first newspaper was circulated in 1780 under the editorship of James Augustus Hicky, named Bengal Gazette. Other newspapers such as The India Gazette, The Calcutta Gazette, The Madras Courier (1785), and The Bombay Herald (1789) soon followed. The Newspapers in all major countries of the world became much more important in the 19th century because of a series of technical, business, political, and cultural changes. Worldwide thousands of newspapers are published daily and Revenue in the Digital Newspapers & Magazines segment is projected to reach US$39.01bn in 2022. The Revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2022-2026) of 3.55%, resulting in a projected market volume of US$44.85bn by 2026. The concept of freedom of speech is often covered by the same laws as freedom of the press, thereby giving equal treatment to spoken and published expression. In India Freedom of the press is legally protected by the Amendment to the constitution of India, while the sovereignty, national integrity, and moral principles are generally protected by the law of India to maintain a hybrid legal system for independent journalism. The media crime is covered by the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which is applicable to all substantive aspects of criminal law. The United Nations General Assembly declared May 3 to be World Press Freedom Day or World Press Day to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of the press and remind governments of their duty to respect and uphold the right to freedom of expression as enshrined under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and marking the anniversary of the Windhoek Declaration, a statement of free press principles put together by African newspaper journalists in Windhoek in 1991. Every year, May 3rd is a date which celebrates the fundamental principles of press freedom; to evaluate press freedom around the world, to defend the media from attacks on their independence and to pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the exercise of their profession. This day was proclaimed World Press Freedom Day by the UN General Assembly in 1993 following a Recommendation adopted at the twenty-sixth session of UNESCO’s General Conference in 1991. It serves as an occasion to inform citizens of violations of press freedom – a reminder that in dozens of countries around the world, publications are censored, fined, suspended and closed down, while journalists, editors and publishers are harassed, attacked, detained and even murdered. It is a date to encourage and develop initiatives in favour of press freedom, and to assess the state of press freedom worldwide. It serves as a reminder to governments of the need to respect their commitment to press freedom and is also a day of reflection among media professionals about issues of press freedom and professional ethics. Just as importantly, World Press Freedom Day is a day of support for media which are targets for the restraint, or abolition, of press freedom. The overall ranking of Best Countries measure global performance on a variety of metrics. Canada is the best country in the world for 2021. In 2020, India’s press freedom rank dropped to 142 out of 180 countries in Press Freedom Index, an annual ranking of countries published by Reporters Without Borders (RWB), an international non-governmental organization dedicated to safeguard the right to freedom of information. In 2019, the country’s press freedom was recorded 140 rank in Press Freedom Index, making it a slight decline than in previous annual report.
History: Back in 1735, there was a case involving John Peter Zenger, a journalist and publisher of the New York Weekly Journal. Zenger was sued for libel after publishing critical stories about public officials, but this famous case was overturned. This case established the right of the press to criticize public officials, and it also indicated that true statements are a valid defense when sued for libel. Thereafter, in 1791, the First Amendment was established. This Amendment is the basis of the freedom of the press. During the early 1900s and World War I, two legislative acts were passed to regulate free speech. These acts, the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act, were enacted in order to censor pro-German, socialist, or pacifist publications. However, in 1931, the Supreme Court held that virtually all forms of restraint on free speech were unconstitutional. In the advent of the Cold War in the mid-1900s, news organizations worked to disclose information such as public records relating to wars. These efforts were designed to promote the policy that failing to release information to the public constitutes a threat to the freedom of the press. Thereafter, in the early 1970s, during Vietnam and the Nixon administration, frequent discussions occurred between news agencies and the government. In 1971, a Supreme Court case entitled New York Times v. United States established the significant rights of the press. In this case, the government sought to suppress classified documents known as the Pentagon Papers. These papers included classified information about the Vietnam War. The New York Times fought against the government’s effort to prevent publication, and the Supreme Court upheld the freedom of the press and its First Amendment rights to speech. Thus, the Pentagon Papers were released.
Freedom of Press: Right of freedom of speech and expression is incorporated in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights, 1948. It states that everyone has a right to hold opinion without interference. This right of freedom of expression includes the right to hold opinions to receive and impart information either orally or in writing or in any other form through any of the agencies of the media. Article 19 of the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights 1976 also incorporates the right of freedom of speech and expression. In India the right of freedom of speech and expression is incorporated in 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution. This right of freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental right in the Indian legal system. The right to free press does not exist independently and is incorporated in the right of freedom of speech and expression; and hence the right to free press is regarded as a fundamental right. The press is regarded as the fourth pillar of democracy, as it is a potent check on the policies of the government, which are formulated with malafied intentions. The press also acts as a means for keeping the elected officials responsible to the people who are supposed to serve. The literal meaning of ‘Freedom’ means absence of control or lack of interference from any authority; so also it means no restrictions. Here freedom of press means the right or the liberty to print, publish, or paint without any interference from the state or any other public authority. But according to the principles of Jurisprudence, no right or freedom or liberty can exist absolutely without restrictions; hence freedom of press is also demarcated by number of restrictions. So here freedom of press means the liberty to print, publish, or paint within the ambit of rational and reasonable restrictions.
Importance of free Press: For the democratic functioning of a society, freedom of expression has always been emphasized as an essential and fundamental base of the society. Freedom of speech and expression which includes the freedom of press is considered as the backbone of the democratic society. The extent of the freedom press enjoyed by the press is regarded as the parameter or credentials of democracy of a state. The Press plays an important role because it provides all comprehensive and objective information of all aspects of the country’s Economic, Political, Social, and Cultural aspects. This is the reason very often the freedom of press is described as the oxygen of democracy; and without which a democratic society cannot survive.
Problems faced by Press: India’s gargantuan news market has 82,222 newspapers; Delhi alone has 16 English dailies in circulation. It has close to 800 television news channels, an industry that has almost trebled between 2006 and 2014. Added to that are 124 million broadband Internet connections and 1,500 state-owned, privately-owned and community radio stations. Of this far from monolithic industry the author of the report’s India chapter, AS Panneerselvan, says “I am acutely aware that of the nearly 100,000 professionals in journalism, a substantial number of individuals and institutions uphold the core values and the cardinal principles of journalism. The exceptions are in a minority, but it’s a number sufficient…to colour the popular perception and to undermine public trust.” If the five debilitating problems in the Indian media are not fixed then India’s media boom will be worthless to journalism, writes Panneerselvan. “Even worse, it will of no value to India’s more than 1.2 billion people who may have more infotainment, sensationalism and political spin at their disposal but who will remain ignorant of the facts and analysis of events around them. When that happens is the world’s largest democracy will be seriously weakened.”
In 2020, the Press Council of India, a state-owned body argued that government authorities, including state police’s censorship on mass media is unfavorable citing “intimidation” of journalists and the “curtailment” of press freedom. The country’s news outlets and their associated journalists were allegedly charged with sedition and criminal prosecution charges by the authorities. The Press Club of India (PCI) described charges against journalists as a “string of seemingly malafide actions”. The International Press Institute (IPI), an international organization, dedicated to the improvement of journalistic practices, claims that the government of India is responsible for restricting journalists covering COVID-19 pandemic-related reports in the country. In 2020 or earlier, the government of India issued warnings against the foreign newspapers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Economist, BBC, and Huffington Post for portraying India’s image negatively. Reporters Without Borders stated that followers of Hindutva are attempting to censor claimed “anti-national” thoughts. Coordinated hate campaigns by Hindutva followers against journalists critical of Hindutva sometimes call for those journalists to be murdered. Journalists critical of the government often suffer from criminal prosecutions, with Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code often being cited by prosecutors.
1) Paid news: Paneerselvan, who is also readers’ editor of The Hindu, traces the origins of the unethical practice of paid news back to the liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991. With market forces at play and public investment in private companies, journalists found it sometimes lucrative to write only partially true stories of companies waiting to list on the stock exchanges. The mid-2000s saw business schemes that swapped ad space in newspapers for equity in companies. During the 2008 assembly elections, Hindi dailies published stories about candidates who had no particular news value, even predicting record victories for them. In 2003 Bennett Coleman and Company Ltd, publisher of The Times of India, started a paid content service to send journalists out to cover events for a fee. Television ratings also fail to tell the real picture. The power of media escalates beyond the boundary of human control.
2) Opaque private treaties: Most of the Indian media houses are owned or controlled by politically affiliated people. The European Broadcast Union (EBU) report says that in countries where public media is functional, they have more press freedom and less corruption.
3) Blatant blackmail: In 2012 senior editors of the television channel Zee News were arrested for allegedly demanding Rs 100 crore from Jindal Power and Steel Ltd. In return for this pay-off they offered to dilute their network’s campaign against the company in the coal scam. The blackmail was exposed when JSPL chairman and Congress MP Naveen Jindal conducted a reverse sting on the network’s executives.
4) Widening legal regulatory gap: The Press Council of India has dragged its feet on addressing paid news and other unethical practices, according to the EJN report. In April 2003, a photojournalist tipped the Council off on the practice of advertisements being published as news for a fee. Instead of investigating the matter, the Council merely asked media companies to consider their how their credibility is affected, and issued guidelines they should follow to distinguish news from advertisements. The PCI also failed to act on a damning report produced by journalists Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and K Sreenivas Reddy on the immunity of the media using paid news. Instead of publishing the report, the Council chose to keep it reference material because it could dent the image of media houses! The report came into the public domain only later based on a Right to Information petition.
5) Flawed measurements of audience reach and readership: The yardsticks to measure the reach and impact of the Indian media are dubious at best, the report says. The EJN report cites the example of the Indian Readership Survey of 2013, which claims that the readership of English newspapers fell by a whopping 20% without attributing any reasons to the fall.
6)Attacks On Journalists: India stands at the 140th position out of 180 countries in Press Freedom Index. India is considered to be one of the deadliest countries for a journalist. The Indian Constitution does not grant any specific leverage for journalists to protect their work. However, Article 19 of the Indian Constitution grants freedom of speech to all citizens with reasonable restrictions. The Journalists inside Kashmir must be extremely careful where they go and what they write as frequently it is noticed those who tried to cover the war, Conflicts have been harassed, attacked, or detained.
7) Poor quality: India has over 400 news channels in various languages and another 150 channels are awaiting clearance. The South Asian country also has tens of thousands of news papers and magazines. But the quality of Indian journalism is poor, as evidenced by the fact India ranks 136 among 180 countries in the index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, an NGO.
2022 Theme: Information as a Public Good: This year’s World Press Freedom Day theme “Journalism Under Digital Siege,” examines the challenges to media viability in different regions and media sectors, identifying viable solutions without compromising the integrity and editorial independence and exploring the importance of professional practices. In addition, the session will mark the 10th anniversary of the UN Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalism and the Issue of Impunity and discuss the new challenges that the digital world brings to the safety of journalists. May 3 acts as a reminder of the importance of a free press in a functioning and safe society and serves to commemorate the journalists who have lost their lives in support of the press freedom.
( While Dr Bilkees Nazir is a research scholar at Kashmir University, Dr Bilal A Bhat is Associate Professor at S K University of Sciences & Technology Kashmir-SKUAST-K . Views are their own)
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