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NEW
DELHI: Information & Broadcasting minister Priyaranjan
Dasmunsi will meet the broadcasters on 7 September over the
issue of Broadcast Bill and Code of Content.
The
broadcasters, especially the News Broadcasters Association
(NBA), are going to inform the minister that they would self
govern on the basis of a Code the industry is drafting.
NBA
president and TV Today CEO G Krishnan told Indiantelevision.com
today that the Code is being drafted by a committee and the
process will involve consulting all the news broadcasters
before it is sent to the government.
"It
is a parent and adult children situation… When you are
an adult, would you want your parents to govern you? Likewise
for the industry. We are grown up and we can govern ourselves.
The government has no role to play in that," Krishnan
said.
In
that case, how did a situation arise when the Supreme Court
had to tell a news channel not to air an item that was obscene
and violated the privacy of a woman in the Monica Bedi case?
Is this a sign of maturity?
It
is obvious that the news broadcasters have not taken the issue
lightly, though no one is openly condemning the channel. But
Krishnan said: "It is obviously to take care that such
things do not happen that we are drafting the Code. These
things are being kept in mind."
Asked
whether the implementation of the industry-developed code
would be by an independent identity, say a retired senior
judge, Krishnan stressed that the implementation will be by
an industry body itself.
Meanwhile,
the broadcasters feel that the government will relent. A senior
editor of a news channel reiterated the government could ill
afford to take on the whole industry with the elections approaching.
"We
are confident that a democratic government will be reasonable,
and we are going to present a reasonable case, and expect
the government should also act likewise," Krishnan added.
Meanwhile,
NBA secretary general Annie Joseph said that the people representing
the news broadcasters are:
- G
Krishnan, QW Naqvi and SM Sridhar from TV Today group;
-
Sameer Manchanda, Vinay Tiwari and Ajaya Chand from CNN
IBN group;
- Piyush
Jain and Ashutosh from IBN 7
-
K.V.L.Narayan Rao, Sonia Singh or Barkha Dutt, Manish Kumar
and Pankaj Pachauri from NDTV
- Rohit
Bansal from India TV
- Uday
Shanker, Shazi Zaman, Milind Khandekar, Kapil Chaudhary
from Star
-
Sunil Lulla and Vasudeva Rao from Times Now
- Harish
Doraiswamy and Satish. K. Singh from Zee News, and
-
Annie Joseph from NBA.
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