The News Hour, India Style

While searching for results of the Idaho gubernatorial debate the other day, we inexplicably found ourselves directed to a link to an Indian program called News Hour (obviously not the venerable MacNeill-Lehrer offering). The segment was a debate concerning remarks the Pakistani Interior Minister had made about Norendra Modi, the newly elected Prime Minister of India, and Modi's remarks about a criminal Pakistan is harboring named Dawood Ibrahim.

When I was in junior high school, my mother subscribed to a weekly, 8-page news summary called India News (I think). I can't remember the background on how she came across it, but I'm certain that the subscription was intended to give my brother(s) and me a window to a different world. It certainly did. I read it occasionally, but not often enough to make sense of the cricket stories.

Since I was later a PolySci major, with some interest in international governments, and with this "deep" background in Indian politics, when the hour-long News Hour debate showed up, I thought, "Sure, why not?"

And wow.

Just see for yourself. Try to watch five minutes of it. It starts out slowly. The first person to talk is the moderator, for the love of Pete.



So I was pretty delighted to find that the Colbert Report's Jason Jones had discovered the state of Indian journalism, too, and filed this report (start it at 5 minutes, unless you want to watch the whole show).