If you respond to critiques without facts, then you do set yourself up to appear poorly-informed.

Scroll up and you will see that my response was to your ad hominem; “Quizman, I don’t have to know you – you laid your rather thin knowledge of the subject out there for all to see.” and you continued in the same vein.

Not once did I accuse you likewise in my responses before the one you’ve quoted. In fact you started your first comment with “The people who go on about Al-J’s biases and sensationalism and so on usually are those who have never watched it and do not understand Arabic.”, which is ingenious considering that the stiff criticism they have got from Arab columnists.

All I am saying that is that you can make the discourse more useful and your points more “readable” if you refrained from making generalizations like those. Which is why GB’s points came across better than yours since they are more credible and fact-based.

Anyway, this aside is distasteful to me and this is my last post on this topic.

Most men in general do that (regardless of their background), unless something about the other commenter’s handle or the contents of their posts indicates otherwise. It’s not a specifically desi thing.

I’ve been away from desiland long enough that it was mildy amusing to be reminded of how desi men assume everyone is male till proved otherwise. But that’s just one of the joys of this blog.

Several of the anchors are South Asian, including Shiulie Gosh who is very well known in the UK (she used to be a news anchor on one of Britain’s main terrestrial TV channels), and of course Riz Khan, ex-CNN demigod (I’ve met him briefly — very tall, very wide, very charismatic, and also very polite & courteous towards my parents who happened to be with me at the time).

Ah, the bruised desi male ego.

I agree completely that the “male ego” is a common affliction amongst desis (and I’ve occasionally remarked on it myself here on SM), but I don’t think it’s appropriate to use that particular accusation towards specific individuals without solid evidence supporting it. I doubt that a male commenter casually saying “Ah, another neurotic confused desi woman” would be deemed acceptable behaviour (again, at least without firm prior evidence indicating this to be true about the particular commenter he may be referring to), and we can all imagine the cyberlynching that would immediately occur. I’ve found Quizman to be a thoroughly decent contributor during his participation on this blog.

If a channel were to broadcast videos of killings/beheadings, I’d think it would be worse for the image of the killers overall – I think that was one of the reasons Al Qaeda and their wannabe imitators stopped making and sending those tapes, because they realized people were disgusted by them. It does raise a question of whether one glorifies violence by showing it in its most gruesome detail – was it correct to show images of violence from recent wars in Iraq and so on, or Abu Ghraib. I think that’s a delicate decision and a news channel may decide one way or the other depending on its goals. Sometimes Jazeera Arabic will show children who have been injured or killed (when the same pictures are considered too gruesome for other channels) because they want to draw attention to the effects of, say, American or Israeli military action. Some American channels would be wary of showing dead American soldiers out of sensitivity to their families or perhaps out of wariness that the images could turn people against a current war. Sometimes they will show US-released pictures intended as PR, for example the pictures of Saddam Hussein on the toilet and washing his clothes in jail. Perhaps the journos among us can comment on the ethics of these decisions, but I for one don’t think it’s as simple as “you show pictures because you are sympathetic to perpetrators of violence.”

Let’s just say late Veerappan is still alive and in his prime today; let’s also say he has the technology – Video camera etc, and does regularly what he had done to his victims, but does it on camera – beheading, execution style shooting etc. What would be the reaction of Indians, especially South Indians, if a favorite TV station of his, Zee, Sun, Surya, Gemini whatever, regularly obtains the videos and airs them on a regular basis, say every time he murdered a human ? Agreed, he sent out audio tapes and allowed himself to be interviewed on camera. But what if the the videos were of the atrocities he committed?

I guess, my question in short is, everything else being the same, how would you feel to have an AJ type of channel over our airwaves in India? Delighted, Disgusted ?

Just curious, that’s all.

PS: SP, how do you know Quizman is a male, or even a desi?

After the Paks have West-Asians become desis too?