Srinagar, Mar 14: Jammu and Kashmir Press Corps (JKPC), a body of Kashmir-based newspapers, denied the report of the Press Council of India’s fact-finding committee suggesting that the government was curbing press freedom in Kashmir.
A statement of JKPC dubbed the PCI report not only false but also “malicious” targeting reputed publishers and editors.
JKPC said that a fact-finding committee (FFC) of the PCI, comprising Prakash Dubey, Suman Gupta, and Gurbir Singh visited Kashmir in October last year and the members met the FFC panel.
However, JKPC members said that they were deeply shocked, pained, anguished, and distressed to read the news reports and subsequent selective leakage of the report in the public domain, which reveals that the FFC report was not only factually incorrect and defamatory but had been written with complete malice and malafides as hatchet job to destroy the reputation of editors and publishers of Kashmir-based newspapers.
“It appears that FFC of PCI has written the report only to create sensation to defame editors and newspapers without taking into account their deposition and subsequent narration of truth. The truth as told by prominent editors has been conveniently erased by the FFC from the report. In breach of every established norm of free and fair investigation and complete negation of the guidelines and ethics of such probe, FFC concluded its report without incorporating the version of editors, publishers, and journalists who appeared before it.