Pakistan: A Primer for the New York Times

Over all this, the NYT rode its ‘journalistic’ tractor til all that was left was one pudgy, Punjabi ‘lion.’ Of course, Sharif wants to be seen that way (well, maybe not pudgy), a leader who commands the abject loyalty of the masses. To fall for for that however is to mistake political manipulation for fact, perhaps not unsurprising in a paper that has been–how shall we say it?–fairly gullible when it comes to politicians these last eight years. So, how does it happen that a mass-based movement becomes conflated with one man? Mere credulousness on the part of the NYT is too simplistic an answer. It’s more than that. It’s about those technical requisites of modern American journalism that employ the techniques of fiction to explain events. Journalists are familiar with having to find “characters” and “scenes” for their narrative. In so doing, the field sometimes breaks a cardinal rule of the social sciences: individuals are not stand-ins for social forces. Sharif is not the movement. It’s a theory of history that’s silly and deadly. It’s what walked the US into Iraq and has it looking for Osama bin Laden as al-Qaeda incarnate, now.

Once social forces are written off the page, it becomes easy to forget that they ever existed or can have an autonomous impact. The story that is ‘Pakistan,’ in the NYT, hangs together as a small cast of disparate, unseemly characters: the demagogic opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, an oily Zardari, a hapless Gilani, the inscrutable Kayani. It’s the actions of these great men, not ‘great’ in the normative sense of excellent, terrific, first-rate, but rather mammoth personalities that seem to drive events through their charisma and skill. Those who marched from Quetta, from Karachi, from Lahore only constitute a delirious mob, full of fury, signifying nothing. This is a particular kind of story about how change happens except that in ‘Pakistan,’ the story never changes.

Rich with links, facts, and just thoroughly taking down the veil of ignorance that plagues some types of reporting on critical events in Pakistan (and arguably the entire Eurasian landmass), it’s worth reading in its entirety. Many thanks to Buria for linking it to me.

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