Fake News

Within few hours of issuing new guidelines to govern the accreditation of journalists, the I & B ministry had to withdraw the same on behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention. Though the new rules would have affected only a small number of journalists, there were three broad problems with the new rules.

First  one is that if complaint is registered against  any journalist then his or hers accreditation will be cancelled, till a regulatory agency decided on the matter. Since any one can file a complain against any body, this provision could be misused.

Second the vast majority of fake news is created on  line by vested interest, who basically want public opinion to shift. This include politicians and those supported by political parties, who also deploy vast resources online to propagate these manufactured or fake messages. The new regulations failed to cover these fake news  makers.

Third, to guard against misuse, the definition of fake news itself must only be regulated by the industry itself through bodies like Editors Guild etc.

Now what is fake news— the fake news is a ”news”, which has been created fully knowing before hand that it is not true.You will recall that when Kiran Bedi, was declared BJP’s CM candidate in 2015 Delhi elections. The news was spread that Kiran Bedi has misled every one by telling that she is India’s first lady IPS officer, she is not the first one. This was done just to malign and discredit her, the fact actually is she is the first one. This type of news is called fake news. Fake news can also be explained in this way also- spreading misinformation or disinformation in seven categories, namely parody or satire, misleading content, imposter content (where genuine sources are impersonated, fabricated content, false connection ( where headlines, visuals or captions do not support the content, false context( where genuine information is shared with false contextual information) and manipulated contents ( where genuine content is manipulated to deceive).

The Fake News has gathered momentum with the advent of social media. Actually Fake News is not a new phenomenon, but with popularity of social media it is getting wide and immediate coverage compare to  the traditional media. while traditional media  operated to fixed dead lines like 24 hour cycle for daily newspapers or an hourly cycle for TV news bulletins,  but social media is round the clock media with no dead lines. This makes it more  likely that unverified content will get immediate spread. Finally unlike the traditional media where the recipient knows clearly who is providing the news,  but on social media the source can become anonymous. What all of this means is that it is easier to spread fake news today  by social media, which can make it reach far in a short time.

Lastly why action should not be taken against the purveyors of fake news, the journalists and press body are not in favour of  interference of government in this matter, using the stick of accreditation. Their contention is distinction should be made between genuine errors or incompetence on the part of journalists and clear case of  spreading fake news.So they say it must be left to regulators that are autonomous of govt, like press Council of India, or the National Broadcasters Association and Editors Guild. For sections of media that do not have regulators, some thing will need to be done in this case, and that is how to control the social media.

I have generally seen that at the time any elections, there are more cases of fake news on the social media, and in the printed media the fake news is generally given in satire form( with notifications in the end that this is a satire and that will be in very fine print)

So in the end, only thing I can say is that one has to be careful while reading or watching news which are generally saying against some political party or person, one should not believe them easily and before getting convinced, please go to some other source to know about the authenticity of the same.

In the end, waiting for your reviews/comments/feed backs.