Media code in focus at Sebi

Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) will seek to revive the process to reach an understanding with media players to cut down on the broadcast of market sensitive news and avoid information that drive up or hammer down prices of financial products without being backed by facts.

Coming down heavily on the media for repeatedly giving out inaccurate news to investors and the public, Sebi chairman M Damodaran said the media - in print and electronic formats and across languages - was responsible for the problem.

Damodaran said former Sebi chairmen D R Mehta and G N Bajpai had met media owners and editors in an effort to work out a code of conduct.
He said such a code had been drafted, but there had been no progress on the matter. "Maybe, we will be third time lucky", he said.

For some months now, several Bengali television channels were showing programmes in which self-styled investment experts repeatedly urged viewers to buy or sell specific shares, predicted prices and gave out advice on how the market would behave. Sebi was yet to achieve any success in blocking these programmes, which were being aired on both satellite channels as well as city-based cable networks.

Damodaran said some discussions had been held with the Press Council of India on the issue, but it was still not clear how any measures could be adopted against such activity that caused prices to rise or fall across the board or for specific instruments on financial products markets.

Mehta had asked media houses to set up their own regulatory code but that had not been done, Damodaran said. Bajpai had circulated a suggested code of conduct but that had been ignored by the media houses, he added.