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Just around the same time as the axe fell on Washington Post’s global staff, accompanied by much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I got a message from my Rediff.com editor, Nikhil Lakshman, mentioning it was the 30th anniversary of its founding. An interesting contrast indeed: the old Western flagbearer waning, while the Indian pioneer holds on, despite a plethora of competitors and copycats, including many pushing specific agendas.

That also made me think of why there was a bloodbath at the Washington Post, where they gutted the foreign desks, sports, books, and some leading podcasts, and laid off a third of its staff. I suspect there are two reasons: one is the increasing insularity of the US, a retreat into Fortress America, and paradoxically a turning away from the rest of the world at the very moment the rest of the world should be looming more prominently in the rear-view mirror.

And two, the economics and the technology of the narrative business have turned. On the one hand, print media have been retreating and losing ad revenue for years, and on the other hand, the rise of generativeAI has made it possible to eliminate entire layers of (at least) entry-level journalists, just as it is decimating paralegals, code-jockeys, and apprentice accountants. Only junior doctors seem immune so far, but we shall see how that goes.

I must confess that there was a time when I consumed the Western narrative with gusto: reading Time, Newsweek, and so on, and listening to the BBC. In fact, I actually subscribed to the New York Times for years (ok, in my defense I was living in the New York area), and later The Economist for at least a dozen years. I still listen to some podcasts from the latter, but with considerable caution, as I am far more aware of their biases and proclivities.

That’s where my concern about big-name Western media comes from. They are all somehow associated with the Deep State, that amorphous entity, the hidden puppet-master behind pretty much everything that goes on in foreign and domestic policy. For instance, an outlet that I considered the voice of NATO, turns out to be the voice of Whitehall, Britain’s bureaucracy.

There has long been a truism that the Washington Post is the mouthpiece of Foggy Bottom, i.e. the US State Department, and the New York Times that of Langley, i.e. the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Noam Chomsky long ago made the insightful observation that they are both in the business of “manufacturing consent”, i.e. narrative-peddling to suit vested interests, specifically the Military-Industrial Complex, which likes, or needs, constant wars.

The eclipse of the WaPo is not only a statement about the decreasing influence of the State Department on foreign affairs (in the wake of the decline of the “liberal, rules-based international order”). But it is also because the print media business is no longer lucrative, as the bulk of advertising revenue has now moved online, to the likes of Alphabet, Meta, Amazon et al. Large numbers of smaller US newspapers have closed down over the past few decades.