New Delhi: A TV content monitoring team, called the Electronic Media Monitoring Centre, or EMMC, was set up in 2008 by the United Progressive Alliance government to monitor TV channels across genres to comply with standards. In 2006, the UPA ministry of Information and Broadcasting had earmarked Rs 11.65 crore to set it up for “content monitoring of private television channels and to check the violations of the Programme and Advertising Codes” under the Cable Television Networks (Regulations) Act.
Now, The Morning Context in a detailed report titled, How the Modi government ‘monitors’ the media, says it finds a drastic shift on what it does on the ground and has a report out on its working in detail. It says, “Under the current government, however, the agency seems to have become a tool for excessive surveillance of TV channels, especially news channels, to track reportage and opinion that are critical of the ruling party.”
It cites this as “a radical departure from what it was originally meant to do and its legal mandate under the Cable Television Networks (Regulations) Act”, a law introduced in 1995 to regulate TV content.
What is EMMC?
The Morning Context reports that it was the EMMC that had flagged the Malayalam news channel MediaOne during the 2020 communal violence in Delhi. The channel was taken off the air and in February 2022, the home ministry cancelled its broadcast licence. The Supreme Court quashed the cancellation this month.
Since 2017, EMMC has used, on average, over Rs 16 crore of public funds annually, says the report. But, says Morning Context, its staff, alleging poor pay, scarce benefits and no job security, has taken the government to court in 2020.
Abhay Kumar joined the EMMC in 2014 and is quoted as saying, “We used to monitor content on TV. There were nearly 150 staffers when I joined,” He also said, “About 125 of us would focus on entertainment, music and movie channels and another 25 would monitor the news.”
“The Congress government would occasionally ask for reports on how the media covered the MIB minister,” says Abhay. “But under the BJP government, the EMMC’s responsibility is to maintain a clean image of the government. That it tracks violations of the Programme and Advertising Codes is only on paper.”
The EMMC, capable of tracking 900 TV channels, can flag violations to an inter-ministerial committee. The committee, in turn, recommends the course of action to the Ministry, which then takes the final call.
The codes prohibit TV channels from broadcasting content that “offends good taste”, affects “the integrity of the nation” and “contains criticism of friendly countries”. They are also forbidden from airing anything that could “attack religions or communities”, “promote communal attitudes”, “denigrate” women and children and “encourage or incite violence”.
People working at EMMC told The Morning Context that time and money was not only spent on tracking negative stories on the government but also on the “personal work” of politicians. For example, during the 2018 assembly elections in Rajasthan, the then minister, Rajyavardhan Rathore’s home state, he allegedly asked Rajan and his colleagues to send him monitoring reports on political developments in Rajasthan. In contrast, he says, reports on Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram, which also went to the polls around the same time, went to the MIB.
BJP leader Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore. Photo: PTI /Manvender Vashist/File
Three monitors at EMMC told The Morning Context that 2019 ushered in a new era of media surveillance at the monitoring body. In 2021, monitoring of general entertainment channels was scaled down significantly. The number of monitors who tracked channels like Star Plus, HBO or VH1 dropped from 100 to about five, according to them.
In fact, the EMMC started turning into a “BJP media cell”, says the report. “We were not only making reports on how the media covered Modi but also [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief] Mohan Bhagwat, [home minister] Amit Shah and other senior ministers. The government was squeezing the EMMC for its own cause.”
Parliamentary Committee on EMMC
In 2021, the Ministry told the Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology that the EMMC had flagged zero violations on TV in 2018. In 2019, this number was up to 87. The report says there was only one penalty to a TV channel for “non- compliance of ethical standards” in 2018; this number went up dramatically to 101 in 2019.
The committee probed the Ministry on the reasons cited for flagging violations. In a report titled “Ethical Standards in Media Coverage”, the committee cites two violations flagged by the EMMC. In March 2020, two news channels, Asianet News and MediaOne, were blocked for several hours for allegedly violating the code that bars “attack on religions or communities”, “promoting communal attitudes” and “inciting violence” during their coverage of the February 2020 communal violence in Delhi, triggered by the controversial citizenship law.
In the case of MediaOne, the Ministry’s order stated that the channel was “biased” since it was “deliberately focusing on the vandalism of CAA supporters”. It added: “It [MediaOne] also questions RSS and alleges Delhi Police inaction. Channel seems to be critical towards Delhi Police and RSS.”
Also read: Proportionality, Sealed Covers and the Supreme Court’s Media One Judgment
The order against Asianet News accused the channel of reporting the violence “in a manner which highlighted the attack on places of worship and siding towards a particular community”.
How the right-wing news channel Sudarshan News was dealt with is instructive, says the report. In August 2020, the channel announced a10-episode show called “UPSC Jihad”, where it claimed that Indian Muslims were conspiring to infiltrate the civil services. The monitors told the Morning Context that they prepared a detailed report on the show’s first episode and sent it to the EMMC chief. “We never heard back from him,” he says. “There were no instructions to monitor Sudarshan News for more such content.”
Supreme Court eventually restrained Sudarshan News from broadcasting the show in September that year, calling it “rabid” and “insidious”. Modi government took two months to say that the show was “not in good taste”.
Sudarshan TV’s programme Bindass Bol. Photo: File
Sued by employees
EMMC has four permanent employees, director general, deputy director and two assistant directors. The rest – monitors, content auditors, technical staff – were hired contractually by the Broadcast Engineering Consultants India Limited (BECIL), a public sector enterprise.
In December 2020, 57 contractual staffers, led by Abhay, filed a petition against the EMMC, BECIL and the government before the Delhi high court, alleging that they were just not compensated enough.
“The contractual staff at the EMMC are the backbone of monitoring services,” the petition went on. “Though these contractual staff were not getting adequately rewarded in terms of their salary and career prospects…”
In August 2020, according to the petition filed, the ministry had announced that it was phasing out BECIL as a recruitment partner and replacing it with a private vendor that it would choose through a government portal. The staffers alleged that another body in the MIB, called the New Media Wing, had acquired a private vendor to hire its staff, which allegedly led to layoffs.
In July 2021, the government filed a reply in court, saying that “no decision had been taken to replace the current set of contractual staff” and that the transition to the government portal for hiring was meant “to move towards a more transparent process of recruitment”. The contractual workers at the EMMC, it added, were “variable and cannot be considered perennial”.
Abhay told The Morning Context he had been sacked as had eight others and another eight left. “BECIL was phased out because monitors at the EMMC were getting very assertive about their rights as workers,” he is cited as saying. “This was a ploy by the ministry to shake us off.”
Those who were not fired were transferred “in October 2021, to other bodies like the Press Information Bureau, the Registrar of Newspapers, Doordarshan and All India Radio”. The court case is still being heard.
EMMC assistant director Seema Ojha and deputy director Kamla Verma declined to respond to The Morning Context. “Director general Dhirendra Ojha refused to meet, citing a busy schedule. Questions sent to the EMMC, the MIB and Rathore did not elicit a response either,” says the report.
On the World Press Freedom Index – which highlights the degree of freedom that journalists, news organisations and netizens have in each country, and the government’s efforts to respect such freedom – India ranks 150 out of 180 countries.
Meanwhile, new Information Technology Rules were brought by the Modi government two weeks ago. The Rules grant extraordinary powers to a government-appointed “fact-checking” committee to take down any “fake or false or misleading” information, with respect to “any business of the Central Government” online. An earlier version of this Rule had empowered the Press Information Bureau to act as a fact-checking unit.