Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday once again preached do’s and don’ts for media houses saying that they should make public the source of funding for the poll opinion conducted by it.
Senior leaders of AAP appealed to the Election Commission to set up a separate regulatory body for opinion polls and opposed the idea of banning opinion polls and suggested that a model code of conduct needed to be imposed for the opinion polls. Meanwhile, the AAP has also decided to write to the News Broadcaster Standard Authority (NBSA), Editor’s Guild to further their demands.
The former Delhi Chief Minister said that all the media houses must disclose the list of their share holders, investors and lenders, their annual financial statements and make full disclosure of their political connections and business interests outside media. He also claimed that a scam involving survey agencies was operational in the country. “We had been saying since September, October that there is an ‘opinion poll scam’ operational in the Capital. Every week there is an opinion poll, how is such a huge survey done within a week,” he said, adding that the NBSA should verify the sting tapes and take strict action if those are found genuine. The demand was made by him a day after a private news channel exposed the alleged malpractices by survey agencies. Kejriwal, however, refused to take questions pertaining to the opinion polls favouring AAP during the Assembly polls in Delhi.
Kejriwal also accused the BJP of ‘bribing’ various opinion poll agencies to get the results in its favour. “We are demanding that the NBSA and the Editors Guild should have checked the veracity of the sting operation and conducted an inquiry into the role of news channels in broadcasting manipulated polls,” he demanded.
Senior AAP leader, Yogendra Yadav said that the agencies conducting opinion polls should make details of the opinion poll public and the entire raw data should be made available to experts. “We are opposing the idea of banning opinion polls and indeed of banning them, EC should enforce a model of code of conduct and form a regulatory authority for them,” said Yadav, adding that there are Standard protocols that are followed in US, UK and Europe and basic details (of the opinion polls) should be made available to the world.