Zee’s WION launched to ‘rival CNN’
August 16, 2016
By Chris Forrester
Zee Media’s World Is One News (WION) launched August 15th, India’s Independence Day, with a former CNN award-winning journalist and producer at its helm. Rohit Gandhi is running the news channel, which promises to take a fresh look at news from a South Asian perspective.
Gandhi, in an opinion piece published at the Mumbai launch, said: “For decades, media has been pushing the agenda of a country or a group of countries. Primarily Western news outlets have occupied that space and they push their viewpoint. They try and come as close possible to an “unbiased” approach. But they are far removed from reality as they are unable to decipher the intricacies involved… The stories were myopic and many times their selection was biased. The only stories that made to the forefront were about poverty, manual scavenging or the monkeys. I knew that I couldn’t work in a myopic news environment; I had to tell the stories that were nuanced and looked at all sides of a society or societies.”
Gandhi spent 6 years working at CNN, and then CNBC. His boss, Indian media mogul Subhash Chandra, has long advocated that a global news channel needs to look at what is happening in the world, but not coloured from a ‘western’ viewpoint.
WION says its channel is already available to 37 countries.