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Parliament panel to review Press Council law
The standing committee on communications and information technology will look at ways to widen the purview of the Press Council of India Act to bring social media under its purview.
The standing committee on communications and information technology will look at ways to widen the purview of the Press Council of India Act to bring social media such as Facebook, online media channels, and YouTube channels under its purview, people familiar with the matter said, adding that it will also explore ways to enhance the powers of the statutory body.
The standing committee on communications and information technology was reconstituted on September 26 this year and BJP lawmaker Nishikant Dubey was appointed as its chairman. The panel will meet for the first time on October 7 to decide its agenda.
Dubey tweeted on Thursday to announce some of the priorities of the panel, which he said would “participate” in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision for developed India 2047. “This Parliamentary Committee will review fake news, the status of journalists, the new online media laws of the British and European Union, the losses being caused to IT due to the World Trade Organization agreement, the status of newspapers, the laws of broadcasting, the copyright act, the censor board, the status of film artists, our committee will also look into the Press Council Act,” he tweeted.
To be sure, this is not the first time a standing committee will seek to do this. In the last Lok Sabha, the standing committee on communications and IT, headed by the Shiv Sena’s Prataprao Jadhav suggested making PCI into a wider media council, a recommendation rejected by the government on the grounds that other media platforms have self regulatory bodies that perform the same task.
The officials cited in the first instance said The Press Council of India Act of 1978 restricts the powers of the PCI in two ways. “The PCI has limited powers of enforcing the guidelines issued. It cannot penalize newspapers, news agencies, editors and journalists for violation of the guidelines,” one official said.
A second added that “PCI only overviews the functioning of print media” and “does not have the power to review the functioning of the electronic media like radio, television and internet media”.
“The media landscape has undergone a sea change in these 46 years. The review will be aimed to empower the council that has been created through an act of Parliament and make it an umbrella body to oversee various platforms of media,” added the second official.
PCI officials declined to comment.
The committee will also review the way in which members of the PCI are appointed. There are total of 28 members of the PCI including the Chairperson, who is a retired Supreme Court judge nominated by a committee consisting of the Rajya Sabha Chairman, Lok Sabha Speaker and an elected member from the council.
“As far as selection of the Chairperson is concerned, there is a clear procedure, but there is no such process for the selection process of other members. The panel might look at setting parameters in this regard,” said the first official.
