Today, each one of the assumptions that underpinned western policymaking and journalism for nearly three decades lie shattered
(The following is a lecture delivered by Pankaj Mishra, winner of the 2024 Weston International Award, at the Royal Ontario Museum on September 16.)
“In the beginning was the press and then the world appeared,” Karl Kraus wrote in 1921. The biblical allusion was no rhetorical flourish. Living through an apocalyptic era, the Austrian writer, and arguably the first major media critic, had reason to believe that journalism had moved from being a neutral filter between the popular imagination and the external world. It had taken charge of forging reality itself.
Kraus’s critique had assumed sharper focus during World War I, when he began to blame newspapers for deepening the disaster they were meant to be reporting on. “How is the world ruled and led to war?” Kraus asked, arguing that the origin of the 20th century’s seminal war lay in a continent-wide collapse, triggered by the press, of cognitive and imaginative faculties, which allowed European nations to blunder into a war they could neither anticipate nor stop. “Through decades of practice,” he wrote, “[the reporter] has produced in mankind that degree of unimaginativeness which enables it to wage a war of extermination against itself.”
It may seem easy to look down, from our higher and well-furnished vantage point, on the parochial world of Viennese periodicals that Kraus fulminated against. But as ferocious wars rage unstoppably in Europe and the Middle East, threatening wider conflagrations, and rending the social fabric of several societies, Kraus’s critique of the fourth estate, the so-called pillar of democracy, not only becomes more pertinent. It resonates as a broader analysis of the decay of democratic institutions in the West.
The impunity with which Israel murdered nearly two hundred writers, academics, and journalists in Gaza, after banning foreign reporters from the scene of the executions, was granted to the country by its Western supporters soon after September 11. In 2002, after Israel bombed and destroyed a broadcasting center in the West Bank, Anne Applebaum, a prominent critic today of “autocracy,” asserted that “the official Palestinian media is the right place for Israel to focus its ire.” Trump’s “Muslim ban” and J. D. Vance’s violent fantasies seem outrageous only if one forgets that in 2006 Martin Amis conspiratorially confided to a London Times journalist his “definite urge” to say things like, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan.”
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