[icernet] Views on news What war tells us on media ownership

[Arul Selvan]

  Had, say, an American company owned a significant chunk of an Indian 
newspapers equity  as would have been possible under the I&B 
ministrys original proposal and as may yet happen  would it have been 
possible for that newspaper to be as unambiguously critical of the 
attack on Iraq as most domestic media have been? It is easy to say yes 
but it is also facile and proponents of foreign equity in Indian print 
media must revisit, in the context of Western media coverage of the Iraq 
conflict, their arguments about the invulnerability of the editorial 
line vis a vis equity holding patterns. The point here is not so much 
that Western media coverage of the war is 
biased
. But points of view 
can be irreconcilably different  CNN and BBC, Time and Newsweek seem 
biased to objective Indian viewers and readers, some more some less. But 
that is because these news outlets are operating on fundamentally 
different assumptions about the war, and because soldiers from their 
countries are participating in the conflict. If these media 
organizations abandoned those positions, they would have surely lost 
readers and viewers at home. Similarly, Arab television channels 
covering the war have presented a point of view largely consistent with 
the Arab view of the war for which, in fact, they have been criticised 
by US and UK authorities. Al Jazeera shows injured Iraqi kids and BBC 
shows Royal Marines playing Santa Claus outside a mosque. Both events 
are happening but how important people in different countries assess 
them depends, in events like these, on broad national points of view.

Source:
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=3&theme=&usrsess=1&id=10328