By Neelesh Misra (Hindustan Times)

New Delhi: The snake charmer has been deleted by the computer geek. India’s rapid surge is winning the respect of the world — it gets more columns of newspaper space and airtime than ever before, and three leading names from the international media debated at the HT Leadership Summit on ‘Western media and their global stereotypes’.

“I wonder if the title (of the discussion) itself is a stereotype,” retorted Nik Gowing, main presenter of the British Broadcasting Corporation, at the discussion moderated by Raju Narisetti, managing editor of the Mint newspaper. But Gowing added: “There is no future in seeing the world through the old comfortable prism.”

The panel conceded that as the economy of the West came to depend on the rest of the world, the Western media had shown keen interest in introducing readers and viewers to the new countries.

“There is increasing dependence among American companies on the rest of the world — some of them earn up to 50 per cent of their profits from work done overseas,” said Marcus Brauchli, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, saying that was getting reflected in media coverage.

From 1986, when the Journal published 87 stories about India — a quarter of a story a day — the newspaper published 438 stories — a story and a half — last year, he said. That wasn’t always the case. Brauchli said American newspapers had had stereotypes like “cute Japanese”, “sneaky Japanese”, and “American Japanese”.

But some in the audience disagreed. “When we first invested in India six years ago, the stereotype presented by people like yourself was appalling,” investor James Breiding said in asking the panel a question. “In reality, what we saw was an incredible group of entrepreneurs.”

London-based Robert James Thomson, editor of The Times, said India was caricatured in the British media but newspapers and television channels there had been kinder to the country.

“In the UK at least, India does not particularly have an image problem — Australia has more of an image problem than India,” he said. “When Tata Steel took over Corus, there was hardly a word of complaint in the British media, but when Mittal took over Arcelor, there were coded references to India.”

But alongside the content, there were issues related to the logistics of journalism in India and elsewhere, the panelists said, even as companies come under cash crunches and need the support of media barons to stay afloat. “Do you have the resources to invest in serious news coverage? It is all very well to talk of high quality journalism but unless you have investments you cannot do it,” said Thomson.

“You can’t cover China from just Beijing, or India from just New Delhi or Mumbai,” Gowing said. “In India, if we were covering floods in Assam for example, we still have certain restrictions on us that stop us from using technology like satellite links and broadband.”

On the Indian side, as investor Breiding said, there also were concerns about “self confidence becoming arrogance”. Gowing said on a previous visit to India, one newspaper had imagined the future for India: among other things, a colony on the moon and more than 5 million foreigners working in India as migrants.

Email: neelesh.misra@hindustantimes.com