Pankaj Mishra: Palestine and the ruins of Western journalism

“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...

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