NEW DELHI: In the stiffest ever resistance shown till now, the news channels today unanimously denounced the content code for news broadcasting as a backdoor entry of censorship and refused to have anything to do with it, sources told Indiantelevision.com.The meeting held at the conference hall of the Press Information Bureau saw much heat over the issue, as news channel representatives said that existing laws are sufficient to deal with the issues in hand, whether of privacy, indecency or violence.

Present at the meeting from among the broadcasters were industry seniors Prabhu Chawla (TV Today), Chintamani Rao and Rohit Bansal (India TV), Asutosh (IBN 7) and Arvind Mohan (India Media Group), among others.

The government was represented by senior information and broadcasting (I&B) officials including secretary Asha Swarup, director Prawin Kumar, and joint secretary Zohra Chatterjee.

The channels held that the industry had its own code and would apply that as a self-regulatory measure, and that the proposed Broadcasting Regulatory Authority of India could restrict itself to regulating carriage, not content.

The broadcasters held that they have existing redressal measures, and people who found anything objectionable could post the complaints on the websites of the news channels, or even take them to court.

The news channels have told the ministry that they "shall deal with the issues" and explain their "stand to the courts."

The channels pointed out to the provision mooted in the draft code that in case of a dispute between the editor in chief of a channel and the content auditor, the latter would notify the matter to the central government. This was clearly the first step towards backdoor entry of censorship.

Meanwhile, Chatterjee made a presentation of the draft amended Broadcast Bill, which showed that the government had diluted some of the provisions as per the comments received so far.

One of the key amendments made so far is that the provision of the government taking over any private channel in the public interest has been clarified and watered down to say that this could be done only in the case of war or external aggression.

This precludes any repeat of the Emergency in the broadcast space in the future, sources said.

Attempts to get a response on this from the ministry failed as the officials, including those who had attended the morning meeting with the broadcasters, were in a lengthy meeting with I&B minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi.