Journalism in the age of neocolonialism?

For long, Indian newspapers have relied primarily upon international agencies for foreign news. The big ones, more resourceful than the rest, supplement agency reports with syndicated material from large American and British newspapers. Now they have no hesitation to turn to foreign sources even to inform us about our land and our heroes.

Featured on the back page of today’s edition of The Hindu is a one-and-a-half column story based on an interview with A. R. Rahman, reproduced from The Guardian of Great Britain. The story, datelined London, tells us that Rahman is to attend a festival there.

The reporter, Sarfraz Manzoor informs us that “Rahman may have only achieved global fame recently, but he has been making music for most of his life. He was born to a Hindu-Tamil family, in which his father was a composer, arranger and conductor of music for Malayalam movies, considered more serious and realistic than Hindi films.”

India’s National Newspaper, published since 1878 from Madras, reproduces a Pakistan-born British journalist’s report in a British newspaper to enlighten us on the life and work of the ‘Mozart of Madras’. Is this journalism in the age of neocolonialism?