Anybody who travels enough around the U.S. knows that our newspapers and news magazines can be lame. Not just lame, really lame. India’s English language press is our soul sister in this respect. Sure, I enjoyed the depth of the India Today newsweekly and some articles in the Economic Times. But imagine, if you will, getting most of your news about your nation of 1.1 billion people in a geopolitically sensitive region of the world from the equivalent of USA Today, People magazine, or the MetroWest Daily News.

Well, even our better publications can be just as vapid. Witness, the scene set by our largest print news outlets:

• In Newsweek, it’s all India all the time:
• Fareed Zakaria has a crush on India,
• Jhumpa Lahiri tells Americans what it’s like to be the daughter of Indian immigrants, while . . .
• Ramin Setoodeh says Indians aren’t just for med school anymore.
• Meanwhile Americans should stop worrying and learn to love outsourcing their jobs to “Silican Valley East”. (What a delightfully awkward use of direction!)
• The lovefest in the American edition excluded a cautionary note for Indians, included in the international edition and online.
• The New York Times, which is surprisingly shallow in international news coverage except on the big, big issues has taken note of India, starting with three articles on how good it is to be rich in India (1, 2, and 3) and progressing via editorials to actual news (1 and 2). Thank god.
• But how does it play in Des Moines? While India didn’t make the front page, the Register seems to get all of its world news from AP, and anti-Bush protests are above the fold.

There must be something in the water in Britain, because their press seems to be doing things right. The BBC ignored the America-focused backstory, waiting until today to report any significant news on the meeting, all the while providing extensive South Asian news on a daily basis. And the Economist — which has become my news analysis source of choice — is running a thoughtful lead editorial on the visit and an in depth analysis in their current issue.

While I haven’t read the whole Economist article yet, the editorial cautions the US against giving up too much ground on nonproliferation and warns that India might not be the ideal counterbalance against China, if such a counterbalance is actually needed, which is unclear.

These thoughts have been on my mind since early in our trip to India, and will be the source of another dispatch soon. . . .