At the start of this past week, I was contacted by the production team at the English-language Indian broadcasting company WION and asked to give them time for an interview to be used in a documentary on the outcome of the battle for Bakhmut that they would be airing on Wednesday and would be posting on the internet yesterday, Friday.
We agreed and the interview over Zoom duly took place. It lasted for perhaps 20 minutes and was notable, in my eyes, for somewhat peculiar questions. They were peculiar in that they sought my commentary on rather extravagant statements from Zelensky: his denial that the city had fallen a day after the Russians posted videos of their raising their flag over the city and claimed total victory) and his assertion at the G7 gathering that the destruction of Bakhmut was like the destruction of Hiroshima at the end of WWII. They were also keen for comment on the Wagner military company and on the accusations their boss Prigozhin has made against the regular Russian army for incompetence and hindering his progress in the city.
Here is the final product as released on the internet in three parts. I appear at 2.30 minutes in Part 2 for 45 seconds and at 2.30 in Part 3 for just under one minute. The other interviewees show themselves to be firm defenders of the Washington-Kiev narrative on every aspect of the Bakhmut battle and the war in general.
The fact that 20 minutes of interview was picked over by their team to find a little over one minute of airtime appropriate to their corporate message is nothing new in broadcasting. CNN, for example, has used this practice with interviewees for decades. However, I hold it up in contrast to my more recent experience with other “Global South” broadcasters like Turkey’s TRT and Iran’s Press TV, who exercise no censorship over their interviewees or panelists: 20 minutes of taping there yields 20 minutes on air.
My perception was that the editorial stance of the broadcaster is carefully positioned somewhere between the two warring parties with perhaps the greater weight on the Ukrainian side of the argument. If so, it could be said to roughly represent the divisions in Indian society today between those favoring close relations with the United States and those favoring close relations with Russia.