Stuck in an Orwellian world: Liberal Western media, illiberal global agenda
Author Umesh Upadhyay in his book, Western Media: Narratives on India from Gandhi to Modi, recalls “the summer of 1982”, when he was in Canada. In July that year, Giani Zail Singh was elected the seventh President of India. But to his “utter surprise”, there was no mention of India having a new president in the Canadian newspapers. This despite the fact that Canada had by then “a sizable Punjabi population, so much so that some signage in certain areas was in Gurmukhi. If you happened to travel by Air Canada, there were announcements in Punjabi”. Yet, the appointment of the first Sikh President of India found no mention in Canadian newspapers.
Incidentally, one day, Upadhyay found a news report about India in the local Canadian newspapers. It was regarding a bus accident in which some Hindu pilgrims were killed. “A bus accident in India finds a place in the international section of a Canadian newspaper, but the world’s largest democracy getting a new President — that too a Sikh — doesn’t. Why is that?” This question bothered Upadhyay for long, till he realised that “the Western media’s coverage of developing countries like India is that it solely focuses on disasters — man-made or natural. It creates a lopsided image of such countries as crisis-ridden nations”.
One understands the Western media’s mindset from journalist Gerald Priestland’s article, ‘With Nehru Around India’, for the BBC in the 1950s. “There were times when I found myself writing: ‘This country (India) is doomed; if it does not starve to death or perish of the plague, it will surely explode in bloody revolution.’”
Nothing of the sort happened. India not just evaded such nightmarish scenarios, but also became a power to reckon with, economically as well as geostrategically. To add to it, the country has decided, especially in the past 10 years, to consciously shun its Western colonial hangovers. New India is today far more confident about itself, its cultural/civilisational identity, and of course its space in the world order.
Image courtesy amazon.co.in
Image courtesy amazon.co.in
Now that creates a problem in the West, especially for its media, which has grown up on the “exploding India” story. It just cannot come to terms with getting it all wrong.
This, however, is just half the story. The other half is far more disconcerting. And this second half has two altogether different facets. One, the mainstream media in the West traditionally acts as an extended arm of the government. The Western media coverage of the Ukraine war is a classic example. One can, therefore, see an adverse media reportage or human rights coverage in the American press just before the United States is supposed to seek some economic, commercial or diplomatic concessions from India. The two act in tandem to secure larger American interests.
The second development is as disconcerting for India as it is for the United States. It’s the growing Qatari-Saudi-Chinese money in the American media, think tanks and academia. Millions of dollars have been poured into American institutions, especially in the past two decades, thus creating a class of people American in blood and colour, but Qatari in taste, Chinese in opinions, and Saudi in intellect.
According to a 2022 study, between 2001 and 2021, US higher education institutions received $13 billion in funding from foreign sources, of which Qatar alone contributed $4.7 billion to dozens of American academic institutions, including Harvard. Similarly, a US Education Department record shows that Saudi Arabia contributed $650 million to American universities between 2012 and 2018. Saudi money went to all sorts of American universities: From the elite Harvard and Yale, to public universities like Michigan and Berkeley.
As for Chinese money, nearly 200 US colleges and universities held contracts with Chinese businesses, valued at $2.32 billion, between 2012 and 2024, according to a report published in The Wall Street Journal based on disclosures made to the US Education Department.
Chinese money has also flooded the American media. As per a report based on the US Justice Department data, which came out in July 2021, China’s propaganda outlet China Daily reportedly paid millions of dollars in funding to some of the most influential US newspapers and publications over the period of six months that year in a bid to control the global narrative. The beneficiaries included the Time magazine ($700,000), the Financial Times ($371,577), Foreign Policy ($291,000), the Los Angeles Times ($272,000), among others. China Daily has also reportedly paid $4.6 million to The Washington Post and $6 million to The Wall Street Journal since November 2016. It spent a total of $11,002,628 on advertising in US newspapers, and another $265,822 on advertising with Twitter.
A study conducted by the US-based Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) in 2022 reveals that as funding from Middle Eastern countries increases, certain campuses witness “campaigns to silence academics, an erosion of democratic values, and a lack of response to attacks on students’ freedom of expression”.
As for the role of Chinese money, the lesser said, the better it is. Author Michael Pillsbury writes in his book, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, about the establishment of the Confucius Institutes across the world. “Officially, the Confucius Institutes offer Chinese language and culture instruction to interested foreigners, often in partnership with local universities. But what they also do is whitewash China’s history, portraying China to foreigners as a pacifist, happy nation that considers Confucius the sole guide to understanding Chinese culture. The institutes encourage a reinterpretation of Sun Tzu’s Art of War as a non-violent treatise.”
Interestingly, one-fifth of all the Confucius Institutes across the world are in America. “That is four times the number in any other country,” Pillsbury writes, as he also informs us about China Daily placing a two-page advertisement in The New York Times touting the institute’s benefits.
The American media, think tanks and universities are thus dictated by Qatari-Saudi-Chinese money. The result has been the creation of a class of Americans who are today the biggest threat to the idea of America, as one can see in the ongoing protests on US campuses where students, under the dark spell of Leftist-Islamist wokeism, are sleepwalking on the road to perdition.
This is a clear and present danger to America and other democracies in the world, especially India. For, it tends to upend the reality, in a classic Orwellian sense, where democracy is projected as dictatorship (India is a perfect example), authoritarianism and fundamentalism invariably get whitewashed (explains why China and Hamas are the new darlings of Western Left-‘liberals’), and terrorism and human rights become interchangeable terminologies.
All this put India in an uncomfortable situation. While the old, traditional media carried its colonial grudge against India: Of failing to predict a country that was destined to doom but today scaling new heights as it threatens to push Japan and Germany behind to become the third largest economy in the world after the United States and China. This old media is equally cagey about the rise of new India that is fast shedding its colonial hangovers to rediscover its civilisational moorings. And in this the old media/academia is ably supported by new American/Western media flushed with Qatari-Saudi-Chinese money. The Islamist-Leftist discomfort, if not distaste, for new, civilisational India is obvious.
No wonder, when the Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy visits the United States, that country’s mainstream ‘liberal’ press calls it a “setback for democracy”! No wonder, an article of a well-known Centre-of-Right Indian journalist on the rise of Narendra Modi is refused to be published in an American newspaper that promises to print “all the news that’s fit to print”. No wonder, a duly elected Indian Prime Minister is never addressed without the label of “Hindu supremacist”, but no such paraphernalia is added to China’s strongman or a West Asian Emir.
We truly are living in an Orwellian world.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.