The difference is that unlike puff pieces which give visibility to a budding starlet or credibility to a social climber, the manipulation of business news can cause investors to collectively make or lose multiple crores of rupees in a single day.

The debate initiated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) raises two basic questions - should journalists be regulated in some fashion and who should do the job?

The answer is that journalists ought to follow a Code of Ethics, but regulation is better left to individual newspapers. The catch is that such codes, even when they exist, are mere scraps of paper which are only used by the newspapers as a defence against any attempts at outside supervision. For instance, one large group found no ethical conflict in choosing to carry a column by a scamster and then justifying its decision to the Press Council of India on the grounds that he had not then been convicted.

Also, most newspapers in India do not even follow basic, internationally accepted disclosure conventions. For instance, if an outside organisation pays for the travel and hospitality of a journalist on assignment, it should be clearly mentioned at the end of the report. Similarly, when publications carry reports about companies owned and controlled by a media house this fact ought to be specifically mentioned. This a practice, scrupulously followed by leading publications such as the Financial Times, Economist and Business Week. In India, the media ownership itself is sometime unclear.

Last week, a significant shareholder of a business paper saw no conflict in being on both sides of the fence, when another company controlled by him was in the middle of a highly publicised takeover. One would have to argue that if newspapers fail to ensure compliance with their internal codes, there may be a case for outside intervention.

In the US, it is independent media monitoring groups such as Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) which keep a hawk's eye on slants and biases in news reports. Unfortunately, no such body exists in India.

The question is, can Sebi fill the gap? I would say that it is a most difficult task and one which Sebi itself would be reluctant to undertake. Though fake and slanted stories are obvious to many, they are even more difficult to prove than insider trading. A regulator has to establish malafide intent on the part of the reporter and that is extremely hard. Smart public relations experts usually use naive and gullible reporters, desperate for a byline, to plant favourable reports.

Journalists can slip up, not necessarily due to corruption, but mere sloppiness or the hurry to meet deadlines. Then again, companies can and do, routinely mislead journalists-they deny true stories, plant false ones, use their clout to suppress negative reports, turn on the pressure by threatening to withdraw advertising and even file false defamation reports to intimidate journalists. The common use of all these strategies by business houses tends to shift the benefit of doubt in favour of journalists.But this still does not mean that chronic mis-reporting and downright corruption cannot be checked. Regular post-mortems by the editor would reveal reporting patterns-frequent exaggeration in relation to specific companies, the disproportionate coverage to specific individuals and groups and the regularity with which papers are forced to carry corrections and apologies on account of a particular scribe are good indicators.

In 1996, the Press Council of India was so outraged at the widespread prevalence of chequebook journalism and rampant plugging of bad public offerings that it formulated a separate code of ethics for business journalists. Those were the days when dozens of press conferences were held everyday and PROs stood at the doors of five-star hotel conference rooms to drag journalists to their IPO conferences. One ingenuous agency even held journalists, literally captive in a room while it paraded five or six different promoters one after the other to hawk their issue. The disgraceful tamasha of those days came to an end, not because of the Press Council's code but because uncontrolled fraud by promoters finally killed the primary market for over three years.

While corruption ought to be controlled, it is important that the scrutiny is not restricted to news that influences stock markets. Political journalists who can fix meetings and strike deals between top politicians and businesspersons are far more corrupt and dangerous than the ordinary business reporter. The dilemma is that these journalists also act as fixers for their own proprietors, thus putting them well above and beyond any Code of Ethics.

Clearly, Sebi has a tough job and one that may be better accomplished by helping create powerful media monitoring agencies or by encouraging publishing houses to go public. A large public shareholding which makes owners answerable to their shareholders may improve transparency and make for more ethical publications.