54 cases of paid news in state
OF 87 COMPLAINTS RECEIVED, 54 WERE FOUND TRUE DURING SCRUTINY. PAID NEWS IS AN ELECTORAL OFFENCE SINCE 2010
JALANDHAR:THE Punjab chief electoral office detected 54 cases of paid news relating to various political parties ahead of the Lok Sabha polls so far.
The 13 parliamentary seats in Punjab will go to polls in the seventh and the last phase on Sunday while the campaign in state ended on Friday.
The CEO office received a total of 87 complaints with regard to paid news against various candidates, of which 54 found were certified during the scrutiny. Paid news has been an electoral offence since 2010.
The Election Commission (EC) has also appointed a media certification and monitoring committee (MCMC) at the district and state-level for checking paid news. It scrutinises all media within its jurisdiction to identify political advertisement in the garb of news.
The CEO office said the expenditure incurred on the paid news would be added to the poll expenditure of the candidate.
During the 2017 assembly elections, the state chief electoral office had detected 80 cases of paid news, including news items in both print and broadcast media.
During the state polls, the EC had even declared a news article relating to the then Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal, which was published in a vernacular paper, as paid news.
During the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, 110 paid news cases were detected by the EC in Punjab.
In 2012, Punjab topped among all the states with 523 certified cases of paid news during the assembly polls.
This time the EC has also been keeping an eye on the social media. It recently ordered to include Rs 1.74 lakh in the election expenditure of BJP’S Gurdaspur candidate Sunny Deol for running a Facebook page without the EC permission.
Navjit Singh Johal, a journalism professor at Punjabi University, said that paid news is a dangerous trend as common readers or viewers can’t differentiate it from real news. “It is the moral responsibility of mediapersons to respect the right of readers or listeners to access accurate information.”
WHAT IS PAID NEWS?
Paid news, as defined by the Press Council of India, is any news or analysis appearing in any media (print and electronic) for a price in cash or kind as consideration.