Surely, don’t journalists deserve far better?

 So, journalists are no longer allowed in India’s Central Hall of Parliament. The Wire had recently carried a report stating that several prominent media organisations, under the aegis of the Press Club of India, had in a letter to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, protested against the denial of normal entry to accredited media persons for covering parliament proceedings. They also expressed concern that “there appears to be a pattern of isolating Parliament and parliamentarians from media scrutiny”. 

 

Incidentally, in the letter, representatives of various media organisations,  including the Editors Guild of India, Press Association, Delhi Union of Journalists and Working News Cameramen’s Association as well as and present and past office-bearers of the Press Club of India had written about a selective approach being adopted in allowing some journalists to visit Parliament. A more recent report from NDTV makes it clear that only a limited numbers of reporters will be allowed in the press galleries of each house while it is in session, apart from journalists from news agencies and state-run TV channels and that no journalist will be allowed in the Central Hall. Only seven reporters will be permitted in the press galleries while the Rajya Sabha is in session and 15 for the Lok Sabha, the report points out. This, apart from news agencies like PTI and UNI, and the state-run Doordarshan, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha TVs.

 

The media, described as the fifth pillar of democracy, has a right to listen to and report on the deliberations taking place in Parliament, senior journalist Sakuntala Narasimhan says, wondering how will people come to know about what is being discussed by our representatives and what decisions are taken. Read her piece in this issue.

 

 

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The Hindu recently reported that senior journalists N. Ram and Sashi Kumar have moved the Supreme Court for an independent probe headed by a former or sitting top court judge into the mass surveillance of several potential ‘targets’, including journalists, lawyers, ministers, Opposition politicians, constitutional functionaries and civil society activists, using military-grade Israeli spyware Pegasus. The petition stated that the spying had caused serious dents on the rights to free speech and privacy and that it had no legal basis. In fact, the legal regime for surveillance under Section 5(2) of the Telegraph Act had been completely bypassed and civilians had become targets.

 

Earlier, The Guardian had reported that the editor of the Financial Times was one of more than 180 editors, investigative reporters and other journalists around the world who were selected as possible candidates for surveillance by government clients of the surveillance firm, NSO Group. Most of the journalists apparently under surveillance worked for the world’s most prestigious media organisations – The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, Associated Press, Bloomberg, Agence France-Presse, The Economist, Reuters and Voice of America. Forbidden Stories, a non-profit, and Amnesty International shared the information with various news organisations including The Guardian and The Wire, as part of the Pegasus Project, an international investigative collaboration. Siddharth Varadarajan, co-founder, The Wire, and senior journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta are two leading names from India apparently under surveillance.

 

Interestingly, Reporters Without Borders has compiled recommendations for journalists who could themselves be the targets of surveillance. Two recommendations are: stop using your smartphone at once and buy a new one to continue communicating; keep the potentially infected device as evidence but keep it far away from yourself and your work environment. Disconnect all accounts from the potentially infected phone and change all the passwords from another device. More information is available at rsf.org/en.

 

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The International Press Institute (IPI) has been defending press freedom since 1950. A little more than one year after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, IPI data shows the extent to which media outlets and journalists have faced harassment and attacks while doing their jobs in reporting on the unprecedented health crisis. Since February, 2020, IPI’s COVID-19 Press Freedom Tracker has recorded 620 press freedom violations around the world. Overall, nearly 200 violations linked to the pandemic were reported from the Asia-Pacific region, of which 107 were from four South Asian countries: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal. With 84 cases, India accounted for the greatest number of violations in the region.