Editors Guild of India has expressed shock and disbelief on the method by which the Group of Ministers (GoM) has ready a report with an embedded toolkit to regulate the narrative in regards to the authorities within the media.
The Editors Guild of India has requested the ruling dispensation on the Centre to safeguard constitutional values of freedom of expression and to make it clear that it’s dedicated to the plurality of views within the media.
The Editors Guild of India in a press release identified the GoM, comprising 5 Cabinet and 4 Ministers of State, had been constituted by the federal government in mid-2020 with none provocation and at a time when varied press freedom and democracy indices present a fast slide.
The Editors Guild of India stated the report, which was ready on the finish of 2020 and has just lately emerged in media, additional “illustrates the government’s increasingly draconian attitude against any critique and inquiry by the press”.
Stating the solutions from the GoM report trace at elevated surveillance and focusing on of writers and journalists who depart from the federal government’s narrative, the Editors Guild of India stated one of many extra disturbing cases is the suggestion by a Union Minister that refers to creating a “strategy to neutralise the people who are writing against the Government without facts and set false narratives/spread fake news”.
The Editors Guild of India additional stated such observations within the absence of any readability on what is going to represent pretend information and the method to be adopted “smack of an intention to simply muzzle any criticism of the government”.
The Editors Guild of India asserted because the report was made public, a few of these named have denied any involvement in its drafting or acknowledged that they have been a part of any such processes.
