Owning up

The Prime Minister has delivered a broadside against the "pink" papers. Speaking in Chandigarh on Saturday, he has asked how many mistakes must the Press make before it gets penalised""arguing that pilots and doctors pay a price for even a single mistake.

Should the Press or individual journalists go unpunished for reports that mislead, say, the stock market where large sums of money are involved?

The question is relevant, after one business TV channel and three financial dailies (including, unhappily, Business Standard) wrongly reported last Wednesday/Thursday on the Prime Minister and/or his office having got involved in action to address the sharp increase in stock prices.

The reports had no basis in fact, the Prime Minister's office issued a denial, and this newspaper has been the only one of the three to correct itself and also apologise for having been misled by market rumours and other media reports.

So the Prime Minister's rebuke was in the wake of sufficient provocation, and is well taken. Manmohan Singh was also right in ascribing at least some errors to competitive pressures in what is by its nature an intensely competitive business.

The question implicit in the Prime Minister's reported remarks is, how should the Press handle this situation? There are laws for defamation but these are not always effective in India, given the way the courts work. In any case, stock market reporting concerns an area where damage to reputation is not the issue.

Those who feel harmed by the Press can also take a complaint to the Press Council, but this is widely regarded as a body not to be taken very seriously.

If you are inclined to extreme propositions, and take the law on suing doctors as a precedent, you could even argue that the Press should be held accountable for collateral damage, in that stock prices fell in the wake of the media reports, but this is impossible to establish because there is no one-to-one correlation between two events.

For instance, Thursday morning saw tax raids on brokers in Ahmedabad, and who is to argue that it wasn't that which pushed down stock prices? In any case, action along these lines would probably have to prove a conspiracy involving the erring Press.

If a conspiracy test is not the yardstick to apply, do you penalise a finance minister for saying that he does not lose his sleep on account of the stock market""while a scam is going on? Or hold government leaders criminally responsible for faulty policies that perpetuate poverty? Holding people responsible for collateral damage can be a problematic proposition""and would in any case end up being an assault on a free Press.

What then is the answer? The responsible Press has three or four to offer. First, it accepts that its own reputation and credibility take a knock if it commits a mistake""and a newspaper without credibility will at some point go into decline or slip into irrelevance.

Second, newspapers like this one have both internal codes of conduct (on share ownership, for instance) and standards of due diligence that are designed to minimise errors despite the competitive deadline pressures. If a mistake does occur despite these safeguards, you immediately own up instead of brushing it under the carpet, so that the correct position is established, and then address individual internal issues. That is what a newspaper owes its readers.

These are not foolproof safeguards in a business that is defined by time pressure. But they have stood the media in good stead over decades across the world, and protected the compact between a newspaper and its readers""which, at the end of the day, is the issue at hand. Speaking for itself, Business Standard re-dedicates itself to the ideals of accuracy, fairness and transparency.