When the Supreme Court began hearing a PIL on the protection of freelance journalists, it surfaced a question that India's legal framework has never cleanly answered: who, in the digital age, counts as a journalist? The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 defines a working journalist as someone whose principal avocation is journalism in print, electronic, or digital media. That definition excludes managerial roles and says nothing about the millions of independent reporters, citizen journalists, and content creators who now break news on smartphones. Government accreditation through the Press Information Bureau operates on circulation-based quotas, leaving many genuine freelancers without formal recognition and, consequently, without legal protection when they cover protests or conflict.
The Press Club of India's Media Transparency and Accountability Bill, 2024 proposed a National Media Council to resolve precisely this gap. The proposal landed in a political moment already charged by crackdowns on unaccredited journalists, forcing a public reckoning with the structural inadequacy of the existing framework.
India's media regulation is not a system. It is a collection of medium-specific statutes that were never designed to speak to each other. Print falls under the Press Council of India, a statutory quasi-judicial body established by the Press Council Act, 1978, which functions as a moral watchdog but carries no punitive powers: it cannot impose fines, suspend publications, or compel corrections. Television operates partly through the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 and partly through the self-regulatory News Broadcasting and Digital Standards Authority (NBDSA), whose jurisdiction depends on voluntary membership and whose sanctions large broadcasters routinely ignore when ratings pressures mount. Digital news and OTT content are governed by the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which critics argue vest excessive oversight in the executive.
The problem is convergence. A single media house today publishes a newspaper, runs a news channel, and operates a digital portal, yet each of those arms is regulated by a different body under a different statute with different standards. The result is regulatory arbitrage: content that would attract scrutiny in one medium migrates to another.
The affirmative case for an NMC rests on four compounding failures: the PCI's toothlessness, the collapse of TV self-regulation under ratings incentives, the threat of AI-generated deepfakes and coordinated misinformation that no existing body is equipped to address at scale, and the growing concentration of cross-media ownership that erodes editorial plurality without triggering any regulatory response.
The structural challenges are serious enough to make reform harder than its proponents acknowledge. Any NMC funded through the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting will face a straightforward conflict of interest. More corrosive is the advertising lever: the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity controls the allocation of government advertising, and the Supreme Court recognised in Bennett Coleman and Co. v Union of India (1972) that policies causing the financial strangulation of the press violate Article 19(1)(a). If that lever remains in executive hands, an NMC cannot protect editorial independence regardless of how its charter is written.
There is also a constitutional tension at the heart of the licensing question. Granting the NMC punitive powers, or making professional accreditation a prerequisite for publishing news, risks converting a regulatory body into a gatekeeper, which would itself fall foul of Article 19(1)(a) read with the reasonable restrictions enumerated in Article 19(2). A licence that is a privilege for access to government events is constitutionally defensible; a licence that is a condition for the right to report is not.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and IT, in its 27th Report of 2021 on ethical standards in media coverage, pointed toward a co-regulation model combining statutory backing with genuine self-regulation as the least dangerous path. The TRAI's 2014 report on media ownership recommended strict cross-media caps that have never been enacted. Anti-SLAPP legislation, which would protect journalists from Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation filed by powerful entities to drain them financially, remains absent from Indian statute books.
An NMC insulated from executive appointments, funded independently, and empowered to regulate across media forms without making licensure a condition of publication could address the genuine failures of the current patchwork. Whether any government would build such a body, rather than one that merely extends its own reach, is the question the debate has not yet answered.
With reference to the Press Council of India established under the Press Council Act, 1978, which of the following statements is correct?
The Supreme Court's ruling in Bennett Coleman and Co. v Union of India (1972) is cited in the article in the context of which of the following issues?
Which of the following best describes 'SLAPP suits' as mentioned in the article?
