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Polity & Governance
Mahesh

01/12/23 11:53 AM IST

Broadcast regulation 3.0, commissions and omissions

In News
  • The Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill released recently by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) is part of an arc of endeavours to regulate broadcasting in an integrated manner.
Provisions of the bill
  • It obliges broadcasting network operators and broadcasters to maintain records of subscriber data, and subject this to periodic external audits, as is the international norm.
  • The Bill seeks to stipulate a methodology for audience measurement, and the sale of ratings data.
  • Both mechanisms will bring the much-needed transparency in the opaque value chain of the cable and satellite television business in our country.
  • The Bill completely lacks any guardrails to shield the privacy of subscribers and audiences in such practices of data collection.
  • The provision to permit private actors in terrestrial broadcasting will encourage competition to Doordarshan, the state broadcaster, as is in many G-20 countries.
  • Back in 2016, TRAI had initiated consultations on this.
  • At that time, there was an opinion about terrestrial broadcasting proving viable only for large players, including those already in cable and satellite broadcasting; consequently, such a move, it could be argued, is likely to diminish the diversity of suppliers in broadcasting as a whole.
  • This anxiety can be pacified if the Bill allows terrestrial broadcasting to those not involved in other forms of broadcasting.
  • The Bill empowers the government to inspect broadcasters without intimating them in advance, and to impound their equipment, presumably including those issued to their employees.
Concerns
  • A major concern is the Bill including Over-the-Top (OTT) content suppliers in the definition of broadcasting services — as also proposed in TRAI’s ‘National Broadcasting Policy’.
  • The Bill’s expanded definition of broadcasting constricts the conditions in which journalists and news outlets that are not a part of large, multi-lingual television networks can continue their professional pursuits.
  • The issue is not only of feasibility and costs but also of desirability. Since the role of an internal oversight mechanism is to maintain the accuracy of news and quality of journalism, its design is best left to individual news outlets.
  • They could decide whether to design this along the lines of an ombudsperson, as some newspapers attempted in the past, or akin to a ‘Readers’ Editor’, as practised by few online news outlets.
  • The Bill is mum on issues of ownership. While the Bill is keen to stipulate a methodology for audience measurement, there is no desire to measure the extent of cross-media and vertical ownership.
  • Both these forms of media power thwart the diversity of suppliers, and perhaps, consequently, that of viewpoints, in the marketplace of news.
  • In fact, just last year, TRAI itself had drawn attention to extensive cross-media ownership between newspapers and news broadcasters through indirectly owned affiliates, and the need to evolve a system to capture this. 
  • The Bill is equally silent on creating an independent broadcast regulator, as hinted in TRAI’s paper.
  • This was first mooted in the ‘airwaves’ judgment of 1995, subsequently in the 1997 Broadcasting Bill, and reiterated in the 2007 iteration of the Bill.
  • Instead, this Bill plans a ‘Broadcast Advisory Council’ to examine viewers’ grievances and violations of the Programme Code and Advertisement Code.
  • This raises two concerns: first, the capacity of such a Council to track and address grievances, genuine or motivated, raised by over 800 million TV viewers; and
  • Second, the lack of autonomy accorded to this body, since the Bill empowers the Central government to ultimately decide on the Council’s advice.
Source- The Hindu

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