In 2002, Narendra Modi sat across Jill McGivering from the BBC for an interview. It was shortly after the Gujarat riots, and McGivering asked Modi what he could have done differently. 

Modi’s response has become widely quoted as the biggest lesson he’s learned during his journey from chief minister to prime minister: “One area where I was very, very weak, and that was how to handle the media.”

Twenty-three years later, Modi has arguably mastered the media. And an interesting way to scrutinise what his government wants to see in the media – and what it doesn’t – is through the media advisories issued by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB).

Advisories are issued to all private satellite TV channels, TV service providers, cable operators, digital media platforms, FM stations and community radio stations. They aren’t legally binding – merely guidelines. 

Newslaundry examined the archive of advisories uploaded on the ministry’s website from February 2008 to November 2025. Here’s what we found.

The pre-Modi era

The first advisory to be uploaded online was in February 2008. 

Between 2008 and 2013, 20 advisories were issued, all under the tenure of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Seventeen of them were straightforward and linked to law and ethics: don’t reveal the identities of rape survivors, avoid insensitive language when reporting on disability, prohibit content that shows cruelty to animals, don’t telecast programmes that promote superstitions, occult practices, or witchcraft as factual, and don’t violate courtroom restrictions.

Two were different.

One dated October 21, 2013 criticised news channels for attempting to “denigrate the Office of the Prime Minister of India by constantly trying to compare the speech of the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India with the speech of other political leaders”. The advisory said this was “highly objectionable”, “not appropriate”, and “sensational”.  

The other was issued on December 23, 2012, days after the Nirbhaya rape case in Delhi and during widespread protests against it. The advisory said private news channels had “not been showing due responsibility and maturity in telecasting the events relating [to] the said demonstration” and that such telecasts were "likely to cause deterioration in the law & order situation”.

Then came the Modi years.

Howdy, Modi

Since Modi was sworn in on May 26, 2014, at least 130 advisories have been issued by the MIB – an average of 11-12 per year. To put that in perspective: in the entire six-year period before his tenure, starting February 2008 when the first advisory was uploaded online, only 20 advisories were issued in total.

At the outset, it’s worth noting that about 100 of these 130 advisories were much-needed, such as this one in 2022 that cautioned against airing “scandalous and unverified CCTV footage” after the Delhi riots. Or this 2017 advisory, which cautioned TV channels against airing misleading advertisements for AYUSH drugs.

Many of these advisories were procedural or rights-affirming. For example, in April 2016, the ministry urged channels to increase programming for persons with disabilities and to work towards accessibility features, such as captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing people and audio descriptions for the visually impaired. There were others on the broadcast of sign language translations during Independence Day and Republic Day coverage.

Others highlighted the need for greater national visibility for regions like the Northeast and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, and for........

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