MUMBAI: Musician Vishal Dadlani's online petition, floated on smallchange.in, protesting against the broadcast media's coverage of the Mumbai attacks, and seeking guidelines for covering anti-terrorist operations has received an overwhelming response from within the music industry as well as without.

The online movement which started on 1 December 2008 at 7. 30 pm boasted of about 9000 signatories within the first two days. The traffic was so much within a couple of hours that the website got overloaded and crashed till the early hours of the next morning,... says Dadlani.

There is a sensible population who did feel offended with the way the media portrayed the terror attacks for three days. We now have about 15,000 signatories pending to be added to those already registered so, the total number of signatories should rise above 20,000 by tomorrow. We would be sending a hard copy of the online petition to the Mumbai High court chief justice and we hope he takes cognisance of the petition and issues an appropriate writ order....

The campaign had many artistes from the music industry voicing against the TV channels. Some of the them include Raghu Dixit, Gayatri Ganjawalla, Kunal Ganjawalla, Sona Mohapatra, Anushka Manchanda, Sowmya Raoh,  Gaurav Vaz, Shekhar Ravijiani, Vijay Nair, Mahalakshmi Iyer, Anurag Kashyap, Priya darshini, Punkh the band, etc.

A Mumbaikar, Rishab Jain expresses his anguish stating, I was absolutely shocked and horrified by the detailed footage shown by the TV channels, it would not be allowed anywhere else in the world. In their desperate attempts to get scoops, the media has risked the lives of our brave soldiers and also the lives of the hostages....

Mumbai based Musician Tauseef Akhtar is of the opinion that there has to be a way to keep the media from giving out such sensitive details of operation. He adds, The media has to be blamed to a great extent in making life difficult for our jawans who were trying to finish the whole operation soon. It is high time the channels stop thinking of raising their TRPs and being so insensitive....

Musician Raghu Dixit says, The broadcast media was under pressure for gaining the highest TRPs and resorted to show the terrorist attacks and secret positions of our jawans live. It was ridiculous on part of the media to even ask clich?©d questions to the hostages who just escaped from death....

The media did a good job but they need to be responsible and censor certain classified information,... believes singer Sowmya Raoh. The government must lay down some regulations for broadcasting such information and the channels should themselves draw a line....