India’s government reverses course on ‘fake news’ crackdown
NEW DELHI — The Indian government called the decree a crackdown on fake news. It lasted less than a day.
On Monday evening, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting abruptly announced that it would penalize journalists who spread “fake news,” the term popularized by President Donald Trump to disparage what he has regarded as unfair coverage of his 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and first year in office.
The term is now widely used around the world by authoritarian politicians and governments to describe reporting that they find objectionable.
Members of India’s freewheeling press expressed shock and outrage at the announcement, seeing the hidden hand of Prime Minister Narendra Modi — who enjoys warm relations with Trump — to quell negative media coverage before India’s general election next year.
Within hours of the reaction, Modi’s government annulled the announcement without explanation Tuesday morning. “Press Release regarding Fake News uploaded last evening stands withdrawn,” the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said on its website.
The U-turn was welcomed by free-press advocates who worry about what they see as a global threat in the guise of prohibitions on news deemed by governments to be false. Malaysia’s lower house of Parliament just approved a measure threatening spreaders of “fake news” with prison sentences.
But some Indian journalists said the original announcement might have been meant to test the tolerance of news media outlets for more restrictions. They noted that journalists critical of leaders from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party had been under pressure since the party came to power in 2014.
The original announcement said journalists found to have written or broadcast “fake news” would lose their official accreditation.
“Make no mistake: this is a breathtaking assault on mainstream media,” Shekhar Gupta, a prominent journalist, wrote on Twitter before the amendment was withdrawn.
The penalties in the original announcement did not apply to independent or partisan digital media outlets, some of them regarded in India as major disseminators of fake news. These platforms are not regulated by the two main media regulatory bodies, the Press Council of India or the News Broadcasters Association. Instead, the rules would have been felt primarily by large, established outlets.
In its original announcement, since taken offline, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said that guidelines for the accreditation of journalists were being amended to counter “increasing instances of fake news in various mediums.” The statement did not define fake news or provide guidelines about who could lodge complaints against journalists.