Arnab Goswami: 'Western media never questioned their narrative about Iraq's WMDs'

TimesNow President-News and Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami recently lashed out at CNN and BBC for raising questions about the Indian Army's surgical strikes, where New Delhi said it had attacked terror launchpads along the Line of Control. Speaking at the 10th anniversary event of Russian news network RT, Goswami doubled down on those remarks, saying the flow of media information globally needs to change.

"The hegemony of Western media must end," he said. "The Western media has had it too good for too long, and it has ruined the balance of power that is required, not just in politics and society."

Goswami pulled out figures to buttress his argument, citing someone else at the conference saying 91% of Indians follow "cross-border" news, while only 44%-46% of Americans and British feel the same way.

"But US and UK together contribute 74% of the source of global news, whereas all of Asia contributes 3%," he said. "If I had to summarise that in one line, it basically says that Indians are the least insular people, most open-minded, Americans are the most insular people, but they have complete dominance over the global narrative in terms of news."

"There is a problem in the world in terms of balance. It is from countries like India which speak English where the challenge to the global news hegemony will come. And I think it's just so necessary from a balance of power perspective, the Americans are so concerned about the entry of Russia into the Middle East, they're more concerned that they are going to lose their balance rather than establishing a new balance. Similarly, in the world of media, the time has come to provide a serious counter to global media sources like BBC and CNN which have been hegemonistic for too long."

The moderator then asked Goswami what he was going to do about it, considering he is not just a journalist but also in a media executive role within the Times Group, which runs India's largest English newspaper as well as its most widely watched TV news channel.

Here the Newshour anchor had less of answer, although he did bring up a good reason for why we need more voices in news – including ones that counter his channel's reluctance to question the government and the Indian Army.

"The first thing that I would do would be to remind the Americans of what they have done in the last 20 years in the world," Goswami said. "As the Chinese Premier Zhou-En-Lai said about the Americans, is that they have absolutely no historical memory."

"The fact of the matter is that you must remember today, it is 12 years to the day that the theory of the weapons of mass destruction was fed and if I may say so, amplified by the Western media. Everybody bought it, there were cheerleaders, nobody seriously questioned it, at one point there was an article in Newsweek magazine which said it doesn't matter if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, but the fact is they shouldn't get any." 

He went on to say that he would expect India to build a global platform that might be able to challenge the Western media domination. A recent effort to do just that, through the Zee group's World Is One Network doesn't seem to have gone very far, although Indian government and media executives continue to speak of building India's own Al Jazeera.

"What I'm going to do in a very succinct reply to your question is, to restore the balance by creating a global media environment that is not located out of Washington, New York or London," Goswami said. "You create that global capital, you will have a balance of power. Ten years back you would have never imagined that India would be the software capital of the world. Today we are the software capital of the world, and I think that's where we are headed."