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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Ansari flags 'erroneous' media reports

Ansari flags 'erroneous' media reports

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published Published on Mar 20, 2016   modified Modified on Mar 20, 2016
-The Telegraph

New Delhi: Vice-President Hamid Ansari today cited "erroneous" media reports to warn that such coverage could erode the media's credibility and impair civil liberties but did not refer to the JNU controversy by name.

Ansari, who is also the Rajya Sabha Chair, was addressing a seminar on the "Role of Editors in Today's Media", organised by Rajya Sabha TV.

He conceded the importance of speedy coverage in an age of 24x7 news but stressed that accuracy, and the need to correct any mistakes quickly, was equally important.

"Our own recent experience has shown how erroneous reports exacerbate social and communal divides. There have been cases when news groups have aired content whose veracity and antecedents were doubtful, with disastrous effect," Ansari said.

"While such content may, in the short run, increase visibility or serve preferred political patronage, it eventually detracts from the credibility of the press and eats into the civil liberties."

Some of the coverage of the JNU controversy has ticked most of these boxes: it has involved reports whose accuracy have been questioned and which have divided opinion and led to the media's credibility being questioned from both sides.

Harking back to the recent past "when newspaper editors were intellectual stalwarts who acted as the brains trust of the country", Ansari asserted that the editor must be an independent observer of power.

"Trust is at the heart of the relationship that a news medium has with its readers," he said, underlining the need for the media to remain independent. "Independence is a cornerstone of reliability."

Ansari quoted from The Elements of Journalism, whose authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel noted that journalistic independence was not mere neutrality.

"While editorialists and commentators are not neutral, the source of their credibility is still their accuracy, intellectual fairness and ability to inform - not their devotion to a certain group or outcome," the book says.

Ansari said: "Regrettably, examples of editorial daring and demonstrating the high professional and ethical standards are now few and far between. Even some of the newspapers that have strong reputations of quality have been open to serious allegations on issues of accuracy, empathy and maintaining ethical standards. Correctives are few and far between, and insufficiently enforced."

The Telegraph, 20 March, 2016, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1160320/jsp/nation/story_75532.jsp#.Vu4jHeY1t_k


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