Journalists may lose their Press Information Bureau accreditation if they act in a manner “prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India”, according to the official body’s new rules notified on Monday.
Accreditation with the Press Information Bureau allows journalists access to government offices in Delhi. Accreditation is also needed in order to cover some events attended by the prime minister and the president. The cards provide access to the the media workroom and the PIB library at Delhi’s National Media Centre. Journalists who hold the PIB card are also eligible for certain health facilities and railway fare concessions.
The new rules state that journalists’ accreditation may be suspended or withdrawn if they act “in a manner which is prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence”.
The earlier rules, issued in 2013, did not have this provision. They only stated that accreditation will be withdrawn “as soon as the conditions on which it was given cease to exist”.
“Accreditation is also liable to be withdrawn/suspended if it is found to have been misused,” the earlier rules stated.
Currently, there are more than 2,400 journalists accredited with the agency, according to the Hindustan Times.
Under the new rules, journalists working with digital media outlets that are not news aggregators can apply for accreditation. The websites need to be at least a year old and the journalists seeking accreditation must have at least five years’ experience.
Websites with ten lakh to fifty lakh unique visitors per month in the previous six months can have accreditation for one journalist. Those that have fifty lakh to one crore unique visitors can have accreditation for two journalists, and those that have over 1 crore unique visitors can have accreditation for four journalists.
The old rules stipulated that a news website needed to have at least 10,000 page views per day.
The website also needed to have a minimum annual revenue of Rs 20 lakh from its news portions only, or Rs 2.5 crore from the entire website including the news portion.
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