'Tv Has Helped Hindi's Spread'

WE suffer from a congerie of attitudes that cause us to be surprised by the idea that technology might be beneficial—and perhaps by the underlying principle that free markets are fundamental to our civilisation. A part of that congerie is the eclipse into which the idea of markets passed for a considerable part of this century. It was assumed by Left and Right alike, and indeed is still too often assumed, that markets do not work properly and that governments have to step in. I'm not talking about communism here but about all-pervasive regulation and control.

Well at NewsCorp., we are enlightened. For example, in India we have discovered that tens of thousands of pirates have invested in reception dishes and are selling STAR programming to a few hundred, sometimes just a few score, households in their neighbourhood.

Some cynics have said this will be fatal for STAR. We disagree, and so we look forward to a long partnership with these splendid entrepreneurs. They are pioneering the market—a market that George Orwell, who worked in the BBC's Indian service, said was fatally flawed because it did not embrace the masses.

The case of India, by the way, illustrates another important point: although technology does not lead to tyranny, neither need it lead to chaos. The new markets it creates don't just make Northcliffes rich: they may also solve age-old political problems.

Indian leaders have long been worried about disunity in their vast, multilingual country. This is something we can hardly understand in the English-speaking world, where we achieved political stability long ago. To try to achieve it in India there has been an effort since Independence to promote Hindi as what in India is called the "link language". But the effort has failed for (many) reasons.

Until now. With the coming of the electronic mass media, Hindi is spreading, because everyone wants to watch the best television programming. And I suspect we will see this story repeated throughout the developing world, not least in China with Mandarin.

In which case it will be not only prosperity that we will catch in our network, but also order—and ultimately, peace.

(From a lecture in Melbourne in October 1994.)