NDTV looks all set to go truly Southasian, having entered into a distribution partnership with Dialog TV, Sri Lanka's leading direct-to-home (DTH) service provider, for its English news channel NDTV 24×7. This will make it the only news channel from the region to be present on the DTH platform in Sri Lanka. With this tie-up, NDTV's global presence now extends to all key regions across the world. Sri Lankans, like newshounds in the UK, US, Canada, West Asia, South Africa, Australia-New Zealand, Nepal and Pakistan, will now have the debatable pleasure of watching the dapper Prannoy Roy and the redoubtable Barkha Dutt needle panellists on "We the People".
——————————————————————
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has (finally) clinched a deal to buy Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co for USD 5 billion, thereby ending a century of highly regarded family ownership. On 1 August, the companies announced the signing of a definitive agreement, after the deal won sufficient support to pass from a deeply divided Bancroft family. What will Murdoch chase next? Given the booming Indian/Southasian media market, obviously we can now expect him to come calling. On your guard!
——————————————————————-
Undoubtedly it won't be newspapers in Manipur – not when the gifts delivered are likely to go bang. On 31 July, unidentified youths delivered a bomb in a gift-wrapped package for the editor of The Sangai Express, the largest English-language daily in Manipur. The same night, more unidentified persons barged into the offices of two Manipuri-language dailies, Huyen Lanpao and Naharolgi Thoudang, threatened the staff and demanded that they close the offices. Militant groups, unhappy with the media for not publishing their press releases verbatim, are believed to be behind the attacks. In protest, the media suspended the publication of all newspapers and cable TV news for a week, until the militants tender-ed an apology. Soon thereafter, the Imphal government issued strictures against publishing any material relating to banned insurgent groups, thus squeezing the media firmly between a rock and a hard place.
———————————————————————
Some of us do question media-led public opinion polls. But they do have thier uses, especially when they go trans-border. The notion that a bunch of inane questions can encapsulate layered realities is laughable. But there is no reason that such absurdities should be confined by national boundaries. So we had, in August, the "first-ever" joint Indo-Pakistani poll on what people in the two countries think of each other, of the world and of their future. Sponsored by the Indian Express, Dawn News and CNN-IBN (and designed by the Centre for Study in Developing Societies, in Delhi), the poll was conducted in the "top ten" cities of Pakistan (by A C Nielsen) and the "top twenty" cities of India (by CSDS). Chhetria Patrakar doesn't quite believe these polls, but check this out: on the Kashmir issue, azadi won the top place among both the Indian and Pakistani respondents, over alignment with either India or Pakistan.
———————————————————————