Saturday 31 October 2009

The Broadcasting Media in India – Willing captains to Bush Apologists?

Bush Apologists have found a new offensive ally amongst the Anchors of Indian Media. The Hindustan Times Leadership Summit was where George W Bush received a standing ovation from the Indian media.

CNNIBN's Sagarika Ghose thinks Bush is “charming” and can break the ice with his humour. I do not think that the people of “Eyeraq” share this “charming” opinion of George W Bush. Could we please stop dancing on the graves of the civilians killed in Bush’s wars?

We have an entire audience giving Bush a standing ovation. I did not listen to his speech. I will admit that I did see updates from Indian Media’s twitteratti. In my opinion, the most important part of his speech (irrespective of what he said or did not say) was that he got a standing ovation and it was led by the English broadcasting media.

The people who stood shoulder-to-shoulder and clapped for Bush are the very same people who are glorifying a Home Minister who is about to launch an armed offensive in his country. An offensive that ignores the vast amounts of grey in between the black and white of a Corporatist Policy and the armed ideology of the Naxals. These apologists for Bush are quick to paint a Medha Patkar as anti-democratic. Bush the hero and Patkar the enemy. This endorsement of corporatist policy that has aggression as its foundation is worrying. 

The apologists (in Indian Broadcasting media) are more than happy to share a glass of wine and a laugh with the worst terrorist to have graced this earth since Adolf Hitler. Bush sold his nation’s soul to the Lockheed Martins and Raytheons. Are we supposed to give him a standing ovation and excuse his tyranny? Are we to empathize with him because he could not construct a sentence in his own mother tongue? Are we supposed to laugh at the fact that Americans consider him illiterate? Is that a charming joke?


The questions, as one journalist (thankfully) pointed out, were soft. I would like to be more honest and blunt. The hand-picked questions were intended to establish that George W Bush was the best thing that happened to India.Nobody has the courage to pin George W Bush for his genocide in Iraq.

There is no shock and no awe. What little credibility the English Broadcasting media had left in my books has now been flushed down the toilet.

1 comment:

  1. {In a strong Texas accent }

    That's the way the cookie crumbles ,pardner!

    ReplyDelete