Different realities

AS a journalist struggling to cope with the environment in Pakistan, the state of the media here and worldwide is never far from one’s thoughts — in more ways than one can say. Indeed, this navel gazing is not limited to hacks in the country either. Overall, there is much concern in the world over the state and fate of journalism. And this is the subject of a book titled Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News by Martin Moore and Thomas Colley.

Offering multiple case studies of national media machines and how they are being controlled or used by authoritarian or autocratic governments around the world to create their own version of ‘reality’, the book offers a rich variety with chapters on India, Russia, China and Mexico among others.

Unsurprisingly, for a Pakistani, the chapter on India titled, ‘Godi media’, is perhaps the most attractive. And while it does not cover the Indian media’s coverage during the 2025 Pakistan-India conflict, it does cover the 2019 Balakot events. By focusing on Arnab Goswami and his rise in anchordom, it explains the manner in which the state has come to dominate the electronic media — to the extent of presenting a reality at times far different from what exists on the ground.

It explains the characteristics of this media as hyper-nationalistic with pro-government views, having colourful and loud screens, and exhibiting considerable emotionalism. None of this may come as a surprise to those of us who have been paying attention to the Indian media but the details about the government’s performance during Covid or the manner in which the farmers’ protests were covered are fascinating.

The West’s coverage of Palestinians has exposed the myth of objectivity among its luminaries.

Indeed, as within Pakistan, the government traded access and funding with the media for muted coverage, a relationship that has become more imbalanced and one of subjugation with time — in India that is. According to the book, advertising from the government to media channels has increased in the past couple of decades. At present, 70 per cent of the revenue of the industry comes from advertising and the government spend is a ‘key’ part of this. As there are no comparative numbers available, it is hard to tell how different the numbers were in the earlier years (or pre-Godi media times). However, the chapter is illuminating in explaining to some extent the madness that we Pakistanis witnessed one evening when the Indian channels spent hours reporting on the invasion and destruction of Pakistani cities. Perhaps, one of the most insightful comment is where the authors say that the studio is the ‘command centre’. “Since the Times Now coverage of the Mumbai attacks in 2008, the news has been directed from the studio rather than by events on the ground.”

This is not to say, however, that other chapters are less interesting. Equally fascinating are the ones on the contrasting approaches of the Chinese and Russian media where the former focuses on sending a message to the world about its ‘democratic’ values and countering what it sees as negative news about the country, while the latter has become more inward-looking since the Ukraine war. It is more interested in convincing its own populace about Russian actions in Ukraine rather than the rest of the world. However, the book also discusses the Russian coverage of American politics, especially the elections.

The details about China, too, are fascinating because they reveal the policies of an emerging power. Its media spending (described as “propaganda”) is estimated to be around $7 billion to $10bn compared to the “American public diplomacy budget” of around $670 million (in 2014). The budget for VOA was around $800m in 2020. BBC numbers quoted in the chapter are around $300m before the cuts announced in 2022.

The Chinese media is not just telling its own story in a vocabulary that is essentially Western but has become universal due to the hegemony of the West; hence the focus on highlighting the ‘democratic’ nature of the government and also on its spreading its message by buying space in foreign publications and building media infrastructure in the Global South.

However, the book appears selective to someone who has watched the Western press cover the Israel-Palestine conflict over the past few years. From the vague headlines that rarely assign agency to Israel for the death of Palestinians to tilted coverage to the simple refusal to call it a genocide and shadow banning on social media, the reportage and treatment of the plight of the Palestinians has shattered the myth of the freedom or objectivity of many luminaries of the Western press.

Hence, it is bemusing to go through a book subtitled The Global Battle to Control the News, which focuses on populist, authoritarian governments in mostly non-Western societies but doesn’t touch on the debate over the Western coverage of Palestine. One of the chapters, interestingly, traces the weakening of the BBC to funding shortages and criticism from British politicians.

It, in fact, begins with BBC’s reporting on the attack on Al Ahli hospital in Gaza to explain the work done by journalists trying to verify news and images on social media. ‘Truth seekers’, the authors call this chapter. But while the chapter ends by explaining how the attack was denied by Israel and then later confirmed by the investigation of Al Jazeera and the New York Times (NYT), it never really delves into the criticism the BBC faced for its original reportage, and how Israel called it a “modern blood libel” or the organisation’s “apology”. It simply uses the incident to explain the need for verification and the funding crunch facing the BBC.

Indeed, while the authors do highlight issues such as disinformation and even channels such as Fox News, it is somehow treated very differently from the case studies which focus on autocrats and authoritarian governments which are ‘dictating reality’. The assumption being that in liberal democracies there are only exceptions such as Donald Trump and Fox News (which emerge due to societal polarisation) but no top-down pressures. Not an easy sell at a time where NYT is in the news for having reported on the rape of Palestinians in Israeli captivity, something which wasn’t really news for those who don’t rely on Western media for news from the West Bank or Gaza.

The writer is a journalist

Published in Dawn, May 19th, 2026

if you want to get more information about this news then click on below link

More Detail