Who Counts as Press? Why India's Journalism Exemption Must Protect the Purpose, Not the Publisher

The Drafting Choice That Decides Who Is Free to Report Article

19(1)(a) guarantees every citizen freedom of speech and expression and the Supreme Court has long read press freedom into it. It does not create a special class called "the press". That single textual fact should govern how India repairs the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

The Gap Is Now Admitted Whether an

exemption is needed is no longer seriously in doubt. The Srikrishna Committee's 2018 draft exempted processing for journalistic purposes under Section 47. The 2019 Bill kept a similar carve-out in Clause 36(e). The 2023 Act dropped it.

Today, a reporter's notebook full of names, a source's identity and a photograph of an official are all personal data. Under the Act's consent, notice and erasure rules, the subject of an investigation could in principle refuse consent or demand erasure before publication.

The Digital News Publishers Association calls this pre-censorship and on 27 October the Supreme Court issued notice. What changed the case was the Chief Justice's invitation to the publishers to suggest how press freedom can be protected without being misused.

The court is now effectively asking how the exemption should be drafted. There are two possible models and they lead in very different directions.

Model One: Protect the Publisher

A status-based exemption would cover registered publishers, accredited journalists or members of recognised bodies. It is easy to administer and established publishers would naturally favour it. But it carries a cost. Someone must decide who qualifies and that power to define a journalist quickly becomes a power to license one.

Freelancers, ground reporters, citizen journalists and RTI activists, the very people the DNPA petition says the law endangers, would fall outside it. Since Article 19(1)(a) belongs to every citizen, an exemption that protects only institutions would be harder to defend under Article 14 than the problem it is meant to solve.

Model Two: Protect the Purpose

A purpose-based exemption asks what the data is being processed for, not who is processing it. Article 85 of the EU GDPR requires member states to reconcile data protection with journalistic, academic, artistic and literary expression.

The UK's Data Protection Act, 2018 applies this through a special purposes exemption, available when the person reasonably believes that publication is in the public interest and that the usual obligations would be incompatible with that purpose.

This test fits Indian law well. In R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu (1994), the Supreme Court weighed privacy against the press by asking whether publication served a legitimate public interest, not whether the publisher held a licence.

A purpose test also makes misuse a matter the courts can review: an outlet that hides behind the label of journalism to trade in private data cannot pass the public-interest test.

The RTI Link

The same Act's Section 44(3) amended Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act and removed the public-interest override for personal information. That challenge is already before a Constitution Bench. A purpose-based exemption in the DPDP Act and a restored public-interest override in the RTI Act rest on the same principle and the court should develop them together.

For the exam, the insight is simple: the constitutional question is no longer whether privacy and press freedom must be balanced, but which drafting choice balances them without creating a licensed class of journalists.