Media and opposition had criticised government plan to suspend accreditation from those accused

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The Indian government has scrapped a plan to blacklist journalists judged to be writing “fake news” less than a day after it was announced to widespread criticism.

India’s information and broadcasting ministry said late on Monday that journalists or agencies accused of creating or spreading fake news would be referred to the Press Council of India and another statutory body for broadcast media.

The notice, which cited “the increasing instances of fake news” but did not define it, said journalists would have their official accreditation suspended as soon as any complaint was registered even before it was judged whether it was valid.

Journalists in India can report and publish without official accreditation but the card is usually required for access to government buildings, events and press conferences.

The accreditation of a journalist or agency confirmed to have been producing fake news would have been suspended for six months in the first instance, for a year the second time, and permanently if they were found guilty again by the press council, a body that includes several members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP).

But in a U-turn on Tuesday, the office of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, withdrew the notice, saying the response to the fake news issue should be dealt with by the press council alone.

The announcement had been widely criticised by Indian journalists and opposition figures. Press associations had called an emergency meeting for Tuesday afternoon to coordinate a response.

Shekhar Gupta (@ShekharGupta) Make no mistake: this is a breathtaking assault on mainstream media. It’s a moment like Rajiv Gandhi’s anti-defamation bill. All media shd bury their differences and resist this. https://t.co/pyvgymhIkF

anuradha raman (@raman_anuradha) Any government interference in news and its dissemination will be the death of news itself. Surprising that @smritiirani did not have the time to go through the NBA guidelines https://t.co/FsiE2GBrlA

Sandhya Jain (@vijayvaani) Dear PM @narendramodi The new Fake News guidelines of @smritiirani once again show that she knows nothing +will learn nothing. How has she PRESUMED that Fake News is peddled only by Accredited Print or TV journalists? Most is on Social Media +dubious websites

Commentators had argued the press council’s ethics rules already say that journalists should report with “accuracy and fairness” and so any deliberately false reporting was covered by its existing rules.

Fake news is generally understood to refer to knowingly false reporting intended to influence and manipulate public sentiment. The term was initially used by critics of Donald Trump to describe outlets accused of spreading misinformation in his favour during the 2016 US presidential election.

But Trump and his supporters have since adopted the phrase to attack coverage critical of the president. It has been embraced in the same way in India, with both the BJP and its opponents in the Congress party accusing each other and some media outlets of spreading fake news.

Malicious false news reports have become a serious problem in India as smartphone penetration has increased against a backdrop of generally poor information literacy and tension between different castes and religious groups.



Police regularly arrest people accused of concocting false stories that might ignite violence, many spread over WhatsApp, which has more than 200 million active users in the country.

At the weekend, police in Karnataka state arrested the founder of Postcard News, a website that regularly posts false news stories alleging crimes by Indian Muslims. One recent post showed an injured Jain monk, who the website claimed had been “attacked by a Muslim youth”. In reality, the monk had been in a road accident.

Fact-checking websites such as Alt News have become popular in the past two years for debunking false stories in social and mainstream media.

Malaysia on Monday approved a law against fake news that permits offenders to be jailed for up to six years. The legislation defines fake news as “news, information, data and reports which is or are wholly or partly false”.

Critics fear the sanction will be used to further undermine Malaysian media freedom and silence critical coverage of the prime minister, Najib Razak, including of a corruption scandal in which his associates have been accused of stealing at least $4.5bn.



