Respect Tharoor’s right to silence: Delhi High Court to TV channel

New Delhi : The media cannot convict anyone or insinuate that someone is guilty during pendency of trial, the Delhi high court said on Friday and asked a TV channel to be “tempered and balanced” in airing news on the Sunanda Pushkar death case.

“The culture of thrusting a microphone in the face of a person needs to be deprecated,” though the media’s right to cover news cannot be curbed, the high court said.

In a 61-page judgement, Justice Manmohan observed that an individual affected by a news story “must be given an option to give his version, but he cannot be compelled to speak if he does not want to”.

The court said every individual or an accused “has a right to silence” which needs to be respected.

Though the media has the right to cover stories which cannot be curbed, the court said it has to be sensitive while reporting matters under investigation and exercise “care and caution”.

The court made the observations while dealing with three applications of Congress MP Shashi Tharoor seeking to restrain journalist Arnab Goswami and Republic TV from airing news with regard to his wife Sunanda Pushkar’s death case.

It declined to restrain the journalist and the TV channel on the issue, but said they should seek Mr Tharoor’s version before airing news on his wife’s death.

It held that in this case, the TV channel and the news anchor “have the right to air their stories and the same cannot be curbed, but it has to be tempered and balanced”.