Indian media and the pain of “paid news”

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an veteran journalist and educator with over 33 years of experience in print, radio, television and documentary cinema. He co-authored the report of the sub-committee of the Press Council of India called “Paid News:Page 28-29”. He has authored a textbook entitled “Media Ethics: Truth, Fairness and Objectivity: Making and Breaking News” published by Oxford University Press.


The Election Commission of India is attempting to curb the incidence of “paid news” or advertisements, masquerading as independently generated news content printed in publications or broadcast on television channels in the run-up to the elections to the legislative assemblies of Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. The phenomenon of “paid news” is relatively less widespread in some of these states going to the polls in April and May in comparison to other parts of the country. Nevertheless, the attention being given by the EC to curbing this malpractice is welcome even if the Commission’s efforts can at best be partially successful in tackling the bigger malaise of corruption in the mass media in India.

In recent years, corruption in the Indian media has gone beyond the corruption of individuals or particular media organizations – it has become institutionalised and organised. Newspapers and television channels receive funds for publishing or broadcasting information that is sought to be disguised as “news”, but which is designed to favour particular individuals, corporate entities, political parties or candidates contesting elections. The dividing line between advertising and news got blurred in “Page 3” supplements of leading newspapers, but was, by and large, confined to the activities of film producers, fashion designers, actors, celebrities, sportspersons, corporate captains and socialites.
The next stage was when so-called private treaties or shareholding arrangements were entered into between advertisers and media companies. On August 27, 2010, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) issued guidelines that made it “mandatory” for all media companies to disclose their interests in companies, about whom articles were published or television programmes broadcast. These guidelines are hardly being followed.

Since the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and the assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana later that year, the “paid news” phenomenon acquired an even more pernicious dimension by entering the political sphere. Complimentary “news” reports on candidates appeared in newspapers and television channels without disclosing the fact that monetary transactions had taken place before such reports had been published or broadcast. The transactions were all clandestine and hence, illegal. The deception or fraud took place at three levels. First, the reader or the viewer is deceived into believing that what is essentially an advertisement is news. Secondly, candidates contesting elections do not disclose the true expenditure incurred on campaigning, thereby violating the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961, which have been framed by, and are meant to be enforced by, the Election Commission of India under the Representation of the People Act, 1951. Thirdly, the newspapers and television channels concerned typically receive funds in cash and do not disclose such earnings in their company balance sheets or official statements of accounts thereby violating the provisions of the Companies Act, 1956, as well as the Income Tax Act, 1961, among other laws.

Thus, errant sections of the media contributed to the growing use of money power in politics which undermines democratic processes and norms – even as journalists, editors and publishers pretended to occupy the high moral ground. From 2010 onwards, a number of interventions have been made by the EC, SEBI, the Press Council of India, politicians, civil society organisations and sections within the media to contain such malpractices. Whereas these malpractices were confined to individual transgressions and to a few newspapers and television channels in the past, the sheer scale of what happened in the recent past alarmed some (relatively less greedy) media companies at least who realised that “paid news” damaged their credibility and that clearly differentiating advertising from news would not be so bad for business, after all.

On June 8, 2010, the EC’s principal secretary Tapas Kumar wrote a circular to all chief electoral officers in states and Union territories urging them to halt the malpractice of “paid news” which unduly influences the “free will of the voters, encourages the role of money power in a covert manner and disturbs (the) level playing field in elections”. “The practice of ‘paid news’ has to be seen as an attempt to circumvent the provisions of… the (Representation of the People) Act which prescribe accounting and ceiling of election expenses and make exceeding such prescribed limits a corrupt practice in elections.”

The EC suggested that district committees should keep a watch on election-related news and features in the electronic media. “When there is disproportionate coverage to the speech/activities of a candidate on television/radio channels, which is likely to influence the voters and yield electoral benefit to a particular candidate, and the same coverage appears in several channels, then the candidate should be served with notices by the DEOs (district election officers) to explain her/his stand as to why the coverage should not be treated as advertisement, and (the) matter should be reported to the Commission,” the circular stated.

During the October-November 2010 assembly elections in Bihar, the EC served over 100 show-cause notices served on candidates, some of whom were “forced” to officially disclose the expenditure incurred on “paid news”. Though the Commission appointed a retired officer of the Income Tax department to head the committee that was meant to identify “paid news”, it would be fair to surmise that the EC did not (or could not) take any punitive action against those who illegally received money to put out advertisements in the garb of news in their publications or television channels.

The EC had earlier pointed out that advertisements on the electronic media (radio, television and the Internet) are governed by a 2004 order of the Supreme Court (Secretary, Information & Broadcasting, Government of India versus M/s Gemini Television Pvt Ltd), which is patently anomalous in the sense that whereas television channels and radio stations are prohibited from broadcasting election campaign related news after campaigning stops 48 hours before polling is scheduled to take place, a similar ban does not apply to the print medium and hence, newspapers carrying election campaign related news and advertising even on the morning of polling.

As far as the (2011) forthcoming Assembly Elections are concerned, a huge point worth noting is that in the states of Kerala, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, large sections of the media are polarised along political lines. Readers and viewers are clear about the affiliation of particular newspapers and television channels and this, to an extent, acts as a deterrent against the insertion of “paid news”. In other parts of the country, for instance in Maharashtra, newspapers and television channels whose owners had distinct political leadings published or broadcast favourable “paid news” about candidates belonging to rival parties. Money clearly mattered more than political preference.

In July 2009, a two-member sub-committee of the Press Council of India (PCI), comprising K. Sreenivas Reddy and this writer, was constituted to examine the phenomenon of paid news. The sub-committee, after meeting people in different parts of the country and receiving written and oral representations, submitted a detailed report running into over 36,000-words to the Council in April. A 12-member drafting committee of the PCI was thereafter constituted. On July 31, the Council decided by a narrow majority (by a show of hands as no formal voting was recorded nor dissenting notes allowed) not to annex the full report of the sub-committee to the 3,600 word report of the drafting committee before submitting it to the government.�

The sub-committee’s detailed report was consigned to a mere footnote thanks to the pressures of the publishers’ lobby. However, by making the sub-committee’s 71-page report ‘forbidden fruit’, more readers were attracted. My colleague and I had hoped that if the sub-committee’s report had been made official, it may have shamed some of those named. The situation that currently prevails is that the detailed report of the PCI sub-committee on how corruption in the Indian media undermines democracy is not official but is nevertheless in the public domain and available on a number websites.

The problem in India is that the regulatory authority, the PCI is akin to a toothless tiger. A quasi-judicial body, the Council is merely concerned about the print medium (not television, radio or the internet). It has no powers to punish the errant unlike its counterparts in other countries like US and UK. Self-regulation has its limits and there is a crying need at present to institute an empowered body to regulate the media that is independent of both the government and corporate interests. The media in India should not be uniformly maligned – there are many honest and principled journalists in the country at present who are extremely unhappy about the corruption they see in their profession. Journalists cannot have the right to find fault with all sections of society if they are reluctant to have their own actions scrutinised.