-TheWire.in This new government oversight for streaming service content and online digital news is, put simply, an overkill. Recent Media reports note that the Supreme Court has observed that the new OTT (over the top technology) rules have no teeth, going on to add that some platforms even show pornography in the absence of effective oversight. It has, therefore, directed the government to present rules that are more effective. One expected that the Indian...

-Scroll.in The report by Varieties of Democracy Institute said India is as autocratic as Pakistan in censorship and worse than Bangladesh and Nepal. India has turned into an “electoral autocracy”, an analytical research project by Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute said. The research institute had said last year that the Bharatiya Janata Party now closely resembles a “typical governing party in an autocracy”. A report of the organisation, which conceptualises and measures democracy,...

-The Hindu Online legal news portal Live Law challenges regulations. The Kerala High Court on March 10 restrained the Centre from taking coercive action against Live Law Media Private Ltd., which owns a legal news portal, for any non-compliance with Part III of the new IT (InterMediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. The court issued notice to the Centre on a petition filed by the firm challenging the rules regulating...

-The Indian Express With a more accurate way of measuring GDP growth, the pace of recovery is much slower in real terms Imagine driving a car whose speedometer cannot tell the current speed but only relative to what it was four hours ago. Apart from the comical encounters with police when stopped for speeding and the predicament in defining a “speed limit”, there is a more fundamental problem it would create. The...

-Newslaundry.com Newslaundry spoke to journalists named in a group of ministers’ report on ‘government communication’. Here’s what they have to say. In June 2020, the Narendra Modi government reached out to “prominent persons from the Media field” to help identify strategies to effectively communicate “10 big narratives of the government”. The initiative, led by a group of union ministers who were “guided” by the prime minister, summarised recommendations in a report that...