All ministries have been asked to provide the PMO a list of opinion pieces, editorials and columns about govt policies, along with a summary and feedback.

New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government is not just meticulously monitoring daily news reports about it, but will now also track opinion pieces, editorials and columns.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) will keep a close eye on all such pieces about the government and its policies, since they can often be strongly critical and play a crucial role in shaping and informing public debate, ThePrint has learnt.

A top source in the government said that, to begin with, all ministries have been asked to track and compile opinion pieces and columns on Cabinet decisions, summarise them and give feedback on whether they show the decisions in a positive or negative light.

“This would also include opinion pieces and news reports which appear days after a Cabinet decision is announced,” the official told ThePrint. “These, along with clippings from the print media, will then be compiled together and sent to the PMO on a weekly basis.”

The compilation will be handled by the officer who tracks media coverage for each ministry.

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‘Difficult to regulate opinion pieces’

Opinion pieces, columns and editorials comprise a crucial part of any news publication, including dailies, print or web. In television media, prime-time debates effectively play the same role.

While the Modi government has maintained a tight control on information flow and “leakages”, which form the basis of most news reports, opinion pieces and columns depend purely on the writer’s perspective and viewpoint, or the stand taken by a media house. This, a former official of the Indian Information Service, said could well be coloured because of various factors.

“As a result, one can only disagree with an opinion piece, but can’t counter it with facts, because it is someone’s opinion. Yet, they shape global opinions, may be as much as news reports would do,” the former official said.

“More often than not, such pieces tend to be strongly critical of the government and its policies,” the official added, citing the example of a flurry of opinion pieces on the government’s decision to scrap Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir or even the Citizenship Amendment Bill.

That the Modi government and the BJP pay attention to editorials and opinion pieces is also clear, because several cabinet ministers and party leaders write opinions in leading publications on the government’s important decisions — often to counter negative notions about them.

For example, ThePrint had reported last year that three women BJP leaders — two ministers in the cabinet and former Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje — had written positive opinion pieces on women’s empowerment under the NDA government in September last year, apparently to counter the notion that there was little improvement in women’s lives under the Modi regime.

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Focus on publicity of cabinet decisions

The government’s decision to keep a tab on opinions and columns is also indicative of its increased focus on the publicity of cabinet decisions.

In 2017, the cabinet secretariat had directed all ministries to put forth a detailed communication plan, along with a cabinet note and press brief, for better publicity of cabinet decisions.

The suggested ways of publicising decisions and their impact on people also included publishing opinion pieces in leading dailies, illustrating how they would benefit the masses, beside sending out personalised messages on messaging apps and emails with graphics. Cabinet press briefs, since then, have undergone a sea change, and are much more detailed now.

(Edited by Shreyas Sharma)

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