The Press Council of India (PCI) has taken an action against Star of Mysore over an editorial published in the English daily on April 6, 2020. The organization censured the English daily.
The ‘Star of Mysore’ (SOM) received a censure from the Press Council of India (PCI) in a letter dated December 16 for its editorial “Bad Apples in the Basket” from April 2020. The Mysore-based news outlet allegedly referred to the Muslim population in India as having “bad apples” in the article. Following a PCI censure, the state government in question is required to refrain from publishing any advertisements for three consecutive months.
The Campaign Against Hate Speech, a group that advocates for media responsibility, filed a complaint with the PCI against SOM editor M Govinda Gowda and the then-editor-in-chief KB Ganapathy after the story was published.
According to the complaint, “the news agency is promoting and inciting hatred toward the community (Muslims) on the grounds of religion… thereby violating a basic principle of journalism of not to attribute individual actions to a whole community to spread hatred and violence against it.”
The PCI then established an inquiry committee, which, after hearing from all parties concerned, made a recommendation for censure.
As per the inquiry committee that came to a conclusion after listening to the counsel of the complainant Moksha Sharma and the counsel of the respondents Raghav Awasthi mentioned, “the editorial may have been written in the context of corona pandemic but the conclusion is inevitable that it is targeting one community i.e., the Muslims.”
“Though the community is not being specifically named, the indications are found in certain sentences of the article”, it added.
The committee also refused to accept the newspaper’s apologies, which it had offered on April 10, 2020, not long after the editorial had been published. They claimed that the apology was “not genuine” and had only been made as a result of a mob surrounding the newspaper’s offices.
PCI is a statutory and adjudicating organization in India. It was formed in 1966 and operates under the Press Council Act of 1978.
On the other hand, Star of Mysore is an English daily newspaper. It was launched in 1978.
