Ignoring the resistance of the Indian Newspaper Society, the Editors Guild of India, the News Broadcasters and Digital Association and other media organisations, the central government is going ahead with its decision to establish a Fact Check Unit (FCU) to ‘identify fake or false or misleading’ information relating to any of its business in the digital media. Though the government decision is about information in the digital media, it puts at risk information also in the print and television media, as content flows without borders between the three segments. FCU is therefore a matter of serious concern for the whole media.
The primary question is: Do we need an FCU to identify false information about government activities? Isn’t there a mechanism already in place in every segment of the media—print, television and digital—to identify and rectify such information? This mechanism is two-storeyed. In the lower storey sits the editor for newspapers; the broadcaster for television channels; and the host for digital media entities. In the upper storey sits the Press Council of India for newspapers; the News Broadcasting and Digital Standards Authority (NBDSA) for news broadcasters; and the Digital News Publishers Association or a similar body for digital publishers.
As the media in India is self-regulated, it is this two-storeyed mechanism that enforces professional ethics, not the government. The first principle of professional ethics is that the information must be true to the best of the journalist’s knowledge. The journalist must verify the information and be satisfied that it is factual and accurate before putting it out in public domain. If the information is false, it can happen under two circumstances. One, the journalist did not do enough cross-checking. Two, they did it intentionally to damage someone’s reputation. The first case is of professional lapse, the second of unprofessionalism. Both are violations of professional ethics.
The redress for both kinds of violations starts in the lower storey. The Norms of Journalistic Conduct laid down by the Press Council of India say, “When any factual error or mistake is detected or confirmed, the newspaper should suo-motu publish the correction promptly with due prominence and with apology or expression of regrets in a case of serious lapse.” If the newspaper refuses to rectify the error, the redress is escalated to the upper storey, where the Press Council makes it do it. The Press Council also has powers to recommend suspension of government advertisements to the newspaper for serious or repeated violations.
Similarly for TV channels, the righting of the wrong starts with the broadcaster. On the detection or confirmation of a factual error, they are expected to air a correction, run an apology on the screen and remove it from their digital archives. If they do not do it, the matter travels to the NBDSA in the upper storey which can impose penalties including fine on the broadcaster. As for the digital media, there is no single self-regulatory authority yet like the Press Council or the NBDSA. Every digital publisher is required to establish a self-regulatory mechanism in the form of a grievance officer to respond to complaints regarding violations of professional ethics. Over them are self-regulatory bodies such as the Digital News Publishers Association.
If institutional self-regulation is already in place in the print, television and digital media to counter misinformation, why is the government hell-bent on establishing an FCU? It can always approach those mechanisms to counter misinformation. There is an officer of the Press Information Bureau in every department. They can issue a quick rebuttal if the media puts out anything wrong about their department. If the government still decides to establish a super-regulator, it naturally raises suspicions. And the suspicions are deepened when you look at the vast territory and unquestionable authority assigned to the FCU.
As for territory, the FCU is going to identify misinformation about ‘any business’ of the government in the online space. Now, ‘any business’ is a very broad term and includes all policies, programmes and activities of the government. It is the media’s nature to put all government policies, programmes and activities to scrutiny. And it is the government’s nature to term adverse reports in the media as false and misleading.
We saw that happening during the Covid times. When the media highlighted failures of the government in managing the pandemic and providing care to the people, it dismissed the reports as false and misleading and even invoked laws such as the Disaster Management Act to put several journalists behind bars. As the Indian Newspaper Society aptly noted, “By [becoming] a judge in its own cause, the government…is taking a step to effectively muzzle criticism and…fair comment.”
As for authority, the FCU will be a unit of the government, by the government and for the government. It will have no parliamentary or legal authority. It will have no diversity of representation, as the Press Council and the NBDSA have. Its decision makers will be ministers and mandarins. Their decisions will be based entirely on their judgements. Once the FCU identifies an information as false, they will ask the publisher to remove or disable access to that information within 36 hours. There will be no hearing of the content originator. It happened in the case of the BBC documentary, ‘India: The Modi Question’. It has happened with thousands of social media posts. It has happened with adverse reports in the newspapers appearing in their digital editions. They were ordered to be taken down without giving the originators a chance to defend their content. The principle of natural justice was given a burial.
It is clear that the idea behind the FCU does not seem to be to eliminate false information about government activities but adverse information about them. The government’s intention is to compel the media to present the official version as the one and only truth. The government realises the power of the digital media as more and more people are accessing news online. The FCU is going to serve the government as a digital media intelligence agency. Its job will be to scour the online space to remove dissent under the guise of removing misinformation. It may even use artificial intelligence to make its job easier. The UK government had set up an FCU called Rapid Response Unit (RRU) two years ago. Independent investigations found that the RRU had been doing large-scale monitoring of the content of politicians, academics, activists, journalists and even members of the public in the name of countering misinformation.
Arun Sinha is a writer and commentator
