Opinion How Indian minds can rescue Americans from their polarised media

But there is, of course, a difference between generic manufacturing and cultural production. As one of my professors proposed during my doctoral exams, the question of what distinguishes the political-economy of say, a shoe, is quite different from that of culture.

It is in this vein that those involved with the WAVES conferences might wish to consider the incredible global opportunity that lies before them. For too long, we have conceived of competitiveness for Indian youth as learning to fit in with others’ expectations of us. But with the strong aspiration towards decolonisation in India now, the time is ripe for Indian story-tellers, artists, writers, and journalists to think of themselves as not just applicants before the Western-dominated global cultural sphere, but as pioneers, revolutionaries, and as conquerors (of hearts and minds, if not quite lands and treasures, as the colonisers of yore). There is, in my view, a massive cultural, ideological, and spiritual vacuum in the American cultural landscape that storytellers from India could fill today. Simply put, American media have stopped representing the reality of most American lives.

A few decades ago, Americans laughed at their own Cold War paranoia and xenophobia with a beautiful comedy like The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! A TV series like All in the Family could explore political (and generational) differences in a family without resorting to preachy moralism. But today, the media (and education) in America have normalised the display of absolute rancour over mere political differences. The conventional wisdom (or unexamined cliché) is that Donald Trump’s re-election represents intolerable extremes of racism, misogyny, and other moral ills — not just in him, but in every one of the tens of millions of Americans who voted for him.

This is a peculiarity that was not really seen before the 2016 election. In 2008, students even in liberal San Francisco felt free to say they were not voting for Obama without fear of being called racist. In 2024, no one said a word. But vote for Trump (or for one of his new coalition members like Gabbard, Kennedy, Musk, and Ramaswamy), many did.

So the bigger question for Americans, and Indian friends of America, is this: Can a democracy, or even a society, hope to return to sanity if it continues to fester divisiveness within? The division, after all, is only superficially about politics. At its core, the fracture is in America’s sense of reality itself. The pro- and anti-Trump worlds look different because they are different — on their screens.

I finished my classes this semester with a survey of the state of American media with four examples pertaining to American journalism. The first was a Gallup poll study showing that the American public’s trust in the news media has fallen from 70 per cent in the early 1970s to the low 30 per cent range now. The decline is greater for Republicans: Only 12 per cent say they trust the news media a great deal, while 27 per cent of Independents and 54 per cent of Democrats say the same. This polarisation is sharpest around 2016 (President Donald Trump’s first campaign). The graph spikes in opposite directions, with about 75 per cent of Democrats expressing great faith in news media, and barely 10 per cent of Republicans saying so.

What changed around 2016 to lead to this sort of polarisation in attitudes to the news? Was it really just Trump, or did journalism also change?

A Pew Research survey tells us that a majority of US journalists today (55 per cent) say that “every side does not deserve equal coverage” (while 75 per cent of the public still says all sides ought to be covered). Compare this with a Newhouse school survey of journalists which found that only 3 per cent of journalists in America identify as Republican (36 per cent as Democrats, and the rest, presumably, as “independents”), and we can see how the silo has been built, one righteous-intent-wielding wordsmith at a time.

As if to leave no room for doubt, that gold star of wordsmithery, the New Yorker, recently published a response to the Democratic-bias criticism of journalism with the confident declaration that though most journalists are Democrat supporters, they are so good at their jobs it doesn’t affect their ability to be objective. The article also insists that it is wrong to expect journalists to treat the “problems” of the Harris campaign as even being “comparable” to those of the Trump campaign.

“He who shall not be named” may be a fine literary device for children’s fantasy fiction, but not for news media in a democracy. The belief that Trump’s rise represents something closer to Nazism rather than an attempt at change by fellow American citizens has become more of a religious dogma than a debatable proposition. I also recall the mass “cancel” email sent out to contributors at the Huffington Post in January 2018: The “loudest” voices they claimed, were drowning out more “deserving” ones, even on their own site. Such a description might be apt for a TV panel perhaps, but makes no sense in a forum where one could publish and leave it to readers to make up their own minds.

American media have shrunk from anything that reminds them of reality outside their expectations of what it ought to be. This has led to a landscape of opinions high on energy, and low on depth and memory, a simplistic “With us or against us” binary all over again. This may not be a situation which can be cured from within. But it is a space in which minds accustomed to complexity, diversity, and the use of creative agency in living with differences — Indian minds — could well play a bigger role than before.

In the early 20th century, Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda brought a spiritual message to America. In the 1960s, Ravi Shankar brought to them an immense artistic experience, as if to add to Srila Prabhupada’s own mission of Krishna love!

In the 1990s and 2000s, novels like The Inscrutable Americans and movies like Bollywood Calling sought to represent the Indian-American cultural encounter, but mostly to Indian audiences. But few Indian creatives have managed to depict America to Americans until now. And that ought to be the most important goal for the WAVES participants to consider for the 2020s and 2030s perhaps – a Marshall Plan for the media-divided American mind.

The writer is professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco