Can India Clone Al-Jazeera?
A global media brand promoted by N Ram, Aroon Purie or Shobhana Bhartia is an interesting idea. Maybe none of the media groups these individuals represent would find it viable or appealing enough to venture on their own to open an international edition in London, Paris or Frankfurt. But as a group or part of a consortium of Indian media groups they could create a global media brand. The idea is not so much to provide a newspaper for NRIs but to make westerners read what the rest of the world has to say on issues of global concern such as Iraq, Afghanistan, war on terror or climate change. Western commentators have their columns reprinted in major Indian newspapers. Shouldn’t readers in the west be exposed to opinion columns and columnists of the Indian media, asks Prof. Ramesh Thakur in an edit-page article in The Hindu. “As a high-level UN official, it is clear to me that the writings of Siddharth Varadarajan (of The Hindu) … do not compare unfavourably to the best that The Guardian
