Chinese Premier Li Keqiang was the first world leader to call Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This was followed up by Beijing sending Foreign Minister Wang Yi to New Delhi on Sunday. Gives away billions in assistance to SAARC neighbours. It must take a leap of faith and concurrently invest a billion dollars in its own media which must also cover world affairs as comprehensively as CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera. The returns in power, prestige, influence and business will be astronomical.
Create a Board of Trustees with someone with national prestige and credibility as chairman. The Board will insulate your editorial team from the market as well as the government.
If information is power, it follows that a control on sources of information is essential to wield that power. It is also not possible to conduct an independent foreign policy if the sources of information are controlled by London or Atlanta. Those stations will continue to cast a shadow on our public opinion unless we have a global media of our own.
Narendra Modi has been to China on four occasions as chief minister of Gujarat, twice as State guest, feted at the Great Hall of the People. What, then, was the source of this new found zeal for human rights in China? Even Prime Time TV had set aside a slot to focus on grim looking Chinese, marching with candles.
You would have thought the channels had flown out special teams to Tiananmen Square to cover the event. But this is not the way the World Information Order functions. In fact nothing was happening in Beijing. Channels like CNN, combining with the social media, had whipped up frenzy in Hong Kong which a battery of cameras captured. The footage created the illusion of a nation commemorating Tiananmen Square.
It was this footage which was made available to channels across the globe hooked habitually to a grid controlled in New York and London. The media's critical faculty has been so numbed over a century of colonial experience that it cannot, on occasion, separate news from propaganda.
(With inputs from IANS)
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