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The new minister of information and broadcasting has begum well by declaring that
no clause in the new draft broadcast bill is "sacrosanct". One gets the feeling,
rightly or wrongly, that the earlier over-anxiety on the part of the then minister
to push the bill through Parliament is no longer there. The new minister's
declaration that it will be his endeavour to free the ministry from the minister
and free the media from the ministry may have to be taken with a pinch of salt.
The country has seen several of his predecessors making grandiloquent statements
on the need for freeing the media and when the time comes to take a crucial
decision towards that end, all of them have either dragged their feet or eaten
their words. One hopes that Jaipal Reddy is not playing to the gallery. It is
difficult to believe, in the light of past experience, when he says that there
will not be any interference in the running of the DD and AIR. Such promises have
been made in the past too. If Reddy can minimise such interference and leave the
affairs of the two media to be overseen by a truly impartial regulatory body, not
packed with ex-bureaucrats and ambitious hangers-on who masquerade as media
pundits, he would have conceded a fundamental right of the citizen to listen to
programmes of his choice.
The B.G. Verghese Committee has made several recommendations in this regard which
have all been gathering dust in the cubicles of the ministry. In this connection,
a significant step that the minister can take is to set the stage for an informed
and wide-ranging debate on the draft bill which has just been cleared by the
cabinet. Not only political parties but various groups of citizens, including
academicians, media professionals and common citizens, should get an opportunity
to express their opinions freely. The minister himself has called the bill a
"working draft" which should be modified in the light of the discussions which
follow.
One of the controversial provisions in the bill is the restrictions imposed on
newspaper owners in acquiring more than twenty percent of interest in a radio or
television company. The framers of the bill think that if newspaper proprietors
are allowed unrestricted access to the electronic media, they are likely to mount
a monopoly operation. This is possible. But since the electronic medium's scope
for development in the coming decades is unlimited, no media baron can afford to
he unmindful of the developments twenty years hence in his industry. It is
nobody's case that the print medium would just wither away. Far from it. But radio
and television are right there on the information highway. In any the restrictive
clause in the bill can be circumvented by benami holdings. However, the crucial
test of success is the viewer acceptability of programmes. Or ask bite listeners
of DD. As long as competition is not stifled, there is nothing to fear from
cross-fertilisation of the media. Jaipal Reddy has promised that he will not rush
the bill through Parliament. Confining the bill to cold-storage will be equally
counter-productive.
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