There is a pernicious irony in the whole Fareed Zakaria
controversy. The messenger has been shot at (suspended, if you will) by the
same media fraternity that is supposed to protect him. Worse, he has been shot
down (so to say) for questioning a culture that considers shooting people a
banal reality of human existence; a culture that displays an adamant refusal to
encourage any debate on the practice, no matter what price it pays for it. Or
others do.
In a piece Zakaria wrote for Time on gun control after the
tragic Wisconsin Gurudwara massacre, he lifted a passage from Harvard
University history professor Jill Lepore’s piece on the same issues published
in The New Yorker. The plagiarism was caught. Zakaria apologized while his
employers – Time and CNN (both, by the way, owned by Time Warner) – promptly
suspended him from his duties as editor-at-large and host respectively “pending
further review”. The future of one of the brightest intellectuals hangs in the
balance.
I have no intention to defend Zakaria’s plagiarism here. But
I feel sorry for him. I am also amazed and shocked at the oversight such a
celebrated columnist committed by not attributing a small passage to a fellow
intellectual. Considering the fact that Zakaria was taking on perhaps the most
powerful lobby in the world on an issue that the US loves to be evasive about, I
wish he had shown more diligence than he did.
Having said that, I also invite you – the proud third-world consumers
of the largest media industry in the world – to have a closer look at the
magnificent hypocrisy behind the American mainstream media’s self-righteousness
and perceived integrity. Today, Time and CNN are considered the benchmarks of
open, ‘objective’ and liberal journalism. They command awe, respect, not to
mention a huge global market.
Ideas and institutions gain respect and currency only when there is a force involved. And power does not want truth. It wants what it considers to be true as the truth so as to create conditions to perpetuate and reproduce that power. Truth, in other words, is the enemy of power. Now that’s an anomaly, because the media, by definition, is supposed to bring out the truth to its patrons. But truth does not get you money and market, proximity to power does. So what you get instead from the American mainstream media, patronized by the dominant powers-that-be, is not truth, but manufactured truths, propaganda, cover-ups, misinformation, concealment of information, and even blatant lies that gradually gain the force of truth simply because, as Hitler once said, they must be repeated ad nauseum.
In other words, the mainstream media in the US has consistently prided itself at being the handmaiden of the dominant powers – political, economic, military and cultural. They have acted as tools to indoctrinate, provoke, preach, misinform, and even numb the Americans towards what perhaps the best-known American intellectual Noam Chomsky calls ‘the manufacture of consent’. It is this consent that has helped the American empire invade, kill, loot and dominate as it wished with absolute impunity.
How else do we explain the blatant lies that the American media spread on the presence of what they call the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? What else explains the blacking out of any proper coverage of the massive Occupy movements across the US against what millions of Americans called crony capitalism? How else do we explain the complete erasure of any critical thought and ideas in the American mainstream media? Why is it that a ‘dangerous thinker’ like Arundhati Roy can be published in the Indian mainstream magazines and newspapers while it’s almost impossible to read anything from a Chomsky or a Howard Zinn or even a Jesse Jackson in the American press? How else do we explain the jokes about George W Bush’s famous IQ and Mitt Romney calling the Sikhs ‘Sheikhs’ while mourning the Wisconsin victims? How else can we explain the tragic ignorance of the Americans on the global affairs, a deliberate ignorance sustained by its media so as to keep them from knowing and thinking? How do we account for a complete consensus among the American minds – and its media – over the virtues of capitalism and consumerism? What else explains the American media’s obsession with sports, celebrities and pop culture? Where has the alternate space gone?
It is when we try to answer these questions that we realize the hypocrisy behind what happened to Zakaria. It is at that moment that the ‘hallowed’ institutions of great journalism like the Time begin to look hollow and pedantic. Can’t it be easily alleged that the magazine and the news channel acted so promptly only because the issue that Zakaria had touched in his piece threatens the core of the American Inc.? Even after hundreds of shooting incidents all over the country in which hundreds of children, women and other innocents have been killed, it is naïve to talk about gun control in the US. A Michael Moore may cry hoarse after the tragic Columbine shooting or as we see now, one of the most powerful editors in the world may ask for a renewed debate on the issue. But the status quo is important and profitable, and must be sustained by the press. What is at stake is not only a multi-billion-dollar industry, but a culture of violence that helps the American empire make bombing children, millions of deaths and foreign wars a normative American reality which makes the Americans look ‘cool’.
That explains why any rational voice that challenges the status quo is perceived as dangerous and must be muzzled. That explains why Americans were perhaps more horrified by their popular TV host lifting a paragraph from a historian’s essay and less at the absence of any political or social will to check the proliferation of deadly weapons in their schools, streets, churches, temples and even their bedrooms. To talk of ‘acknowledgment’ and ‘respect’ for other’s writings in a scenario where a crazed racist shoots down six people in cold blood at a small-town Gurudwara only appears as a cruel joke. While Fareed Zakaria is censured in the name of ‘ethics’ and ‘error of judgement’, there has been little talk of censuring a culture that believes in killing people.
As he is silenced the moment he raised that question, I wonder what questions must be coming to Zakaria’s mind now. I bet he is agonizing over what is worse – not attributing a piece of information to somebody who also agrees with your ideas, or being the lapdog – and not the watchdog – of the powers-that-be?
What do you think?
