Things that should be avoided by press under the guidelines for press in the crisis of 1975 are mentioned below:
Guidelines
1. Exaggeration or distortion of facts or incidents in relation to communal matters or giving currency to unverified rumours, suspicions or inferences, as if they were facts and base their comments on them.
2. Employment of intemperate and unrestrained language in the presentation of news or views, even as a piece of literary flourish or for the purposes of rhetoric or emphasis.
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3. Encouraging or condoning violence even in the face of provocation as a means of obtaining redress of grievances, whether the same be genuine or not.
4. Scurrilous and untrue attacks on communities or individuals, particularly when they are accompanied by charges attributing misconduct to them, due to their being members of a particular community or caste.
5. Falsely giving a communal colour to incident in which members of different communities happen to be involved.
6. Emphasising matters that are apt to produce communal hatred or ill-will or fostering feelings of distrust between communities.
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7. Publishing alarming news which is in substance untrue or making provocative comments on such news or views, which are otherwise calculated to embitter relations between different communities or regional or linguistic groups?
8. Exaggerating actual happenings to achieve sensationalism, and publication of news which adversely affect communal harmony with banner headlines or in distinctive types.
While the press, in a democratic country like India, has a primary duty to report events objectively and faithfully, it has also a larger obligation to the nation to defend and preserve the democratic way of life.
Therefore, it is necessary for the press to voluntarily adopt a policy not to play up or give undue publicity or to give ‘celebrity’ treatment to news, which tend to promote authoritarian and dictatorial trends or to aggravate communal or regional tensions.
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In defending democracy and rule of law, the press, in fact, is defending its very existence, as freedom of the press can survive only in a democratic set-up.