The Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) grouping has signaled its intent to expand its footprint in the global media space, with the injection of a one million dollars fund.

During an inaugural session of the BRICS Media Forum in the Chinese capital, Cai Mingzhao, president of Xinhua News Agency and executive president of the Forum, announced that the news agency will invest 1million U.S. dollars for boosting media cooperation in the five-nation grouping.

The plan will promote six objectives, including “balanced reporting”— a view shared by several speakers at the forum who called for alternative media narrative, which did not take the cue from Washington or London. The proposal would also focus on joint development of BRICS digital media, financial information services and promoting people- to-people contacts.

The BRICS media forum is the result of a joint initiative by Xinhua News Agency, Brazil's CMA Group, Russia’s Sputnik News Agency and Radio, The Hindu group of publications from India, and South Africa's Independent Media.

The theme of a BRICS-driven alternative media was also highlighted by Mukund Padmanabhan, editor of “The Hindu”. Mr. Padmanabhan welcomed the Action Plan, and the “very specific proposals” aired by the Xinhua President.

He also highlighted that the BRICS media has to evolve in tune with the explosion of the digital media that is still searching for a viable “revenue model,” without compromising the basic values of quality journalism. He stressed that the media has a “duty and social responsibility” to ensure that “traditional values such as accuracy, fairness, truth, are not forsaken in the interests of speed, sensationalism, and more eyeballs”. Besides, he underscored that the BRICS media must innovate, across multimedia platforms, in order “to remain unique and relevant so that people are willing to pay for what is produced rather than let some platform such as Google, Facebook or Twitter exploit its commercial value”. He pointed out that “ the BRICS, and the emerging economies could well be at the forefront of new wave of industrialisation driven by the concept of sustainable globalisation, which is being currently abandoned by many, especially in the West”.

VLADIMIR KAZBEKOV, the Vice President of the New Development Bank —the multilateral lender for the BRICS — concurred that the media from the emerging economies must expand its influence in the “global media space” in order to challenge, the often “highly biased content” of the current mainstream media.

He pointed out that the NDB aspired strongly to network with the media, academia and the Non-Govern mental Oraganisations (NGO) in the BRICS countries, in order to establish a feedback mechanism that would support the bank’s transparent functioning. He hoped that the media will provide the analytical feedstock, during the debate on the NDB’s upcoming publication of a five-year strategy paper.

Chinese officials at the forum, said that the BRICS was well positioned to expand its global profile by playing its due role in countering the fragile international economic recovery, sluggish investment climate and the challenge posed by international terrorism as well as mass migration of refugees.

Liu Qibao, head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, underscored that BRICS countries were inheritors of “magnificent civilizations,” which needed to be re-anchored in the modern era through multiple engagements including a regular flow of people-to-people exchanges. Mr. Liu saw the Forum as the precursor of a spate of meetings, which would culminate in September with the BRICS

summit Xiamen.