The Hindu Business Line : A voice to put bias where it belongs

The charges against CNN include granting the legitimacy of an elected `President' to Pervez Musharraf when he is a military dictator who has usurped power from a democratically elected Government and using the benign term `militants' in Kashmir to `terrorists' elsewhere.

NEW YORK, Feb. 2

DO you think CNN has a pro-Pakistan bias? Do you feel CNN's coverage leaves an impression that Pakistan is a country fighting terrorism instead of supporting and harbouring terrorists? Nearly 55,000 Indians from over 30 countries around the world think so. And that too in a short span of time.

This groundswell of global opinion in response to an article by Rajiv Malhotra, a Princeton entrepreneur, on the popular Indian community Web site Sulekha.com, and a petition created by Kris Chandrasekar, a Bay Area banker, has directly led to a meeting with top CNN executives in their Atlanta headquarters.

Narsi Narasimhan, an Atlanta consultant, who arranged the meeting and led a group of representatives to discuss the charges in the article and the petition, said, "We had a productive and useful meeting, during which Rajiv Malhotra's Sulekha.com article was presented and discussed in detail. We found a receptive audience in CNN's executives."

Nigel Pritchard, CNN's Vice-President of Public Relations, said, "We continuously welcome and respect the viewpoints of our audience and have thoroughly reviewed the points raised by the petitioners and in the Sulekha article by Rajiv Malhotra. Our objective at CNN remains clear: To provide our viewers with the best possible coverage that is fair, accurate and unbiased. We listen to all sides of a news story and report on all angles."

The global campaign against CNN started when Rajiv Malhotra, President of Infinity Foundation, presented numerous examples in his latest Sulekha.com column demonstrating CNN's continued bias in favour of Pakistan. His charges include CNN reports granting the legitimacy of an elected `President' to Pervez Musharraf when he is a military dictator who has usurped power from a democratically elected Government, using the relatively benign term `militants' in Kashmir while using the term `terrorists' elsewhere, lack of coverage of ethnic cleansing in Pakistan that has reduced non-Muslim population from 10 per cent to 2 per cent.

Says Malhotra: "The ignorant and prejudiced coverage of India by organisations such as CNN is glaring and unforgivable. Sulekha should be commended for providing a popular and effective forum to get the word out."

Taking the cue from the article, Kris Chandrasekar created an online petition that quickly attracted a massive audience as it got circulated on e-mail lists and posted on numerous Web sites. In less than 10 days, nearly 55,000 people had signed the petition.

Chandrasekar commented, "I have received 100s of personal e-mails from around the world on this issue. The support has been just overwhelming; this goes to prove that the Sulekha article by Rajiv has struck a highly resonant chord in Indians worldwide."

Satya Prabhakar, President and CEO of Sulekha.com, said: "Sulekha is proud to be the forum that galvanises global Indian opinion around issues of interest. The Internet is uniquely capable of enabling effective distributed co-ordination. We are glad that Sulekha.com's twin rallying cries of statement and interaction are helping build the social capital of the global Indian community."

The action group is exploring ways to more systematically study biased Indian coverage in American media.

Sulekha.com is the flagship service of Smart Information Worldwide Inc, a leading Internet media and services company with operations in US and India. Sustained by the creative contributions of tens of thousands of Indians from over 50 countries, Sulekha has become the biggest online community for Indians. In addition, it is also the leading provider of ticketing, membership and fundraising services to Indian organisations and is today the biggest online ticketer for Indian events and movies in North America.

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