To…foster a mission of “becoming” and pave the way by providing an answer to the question, “What should we become?”
علی شریعتی / Ali Shariati
In the summer of 2021, I wrote a manuscript for a book titled Decolonizing Journalism. The manuscript was never published, and the book’s original publisher decided not to proceed with the work. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about what to do with the work and how best to share it. I have decided to share it here on this blog, The Spinning Head, which I began in 2008 and which was the basis of the book itself.
The blog The Spinning Head itself was started in response to the US media’s overt and naked collusion in America’s illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The sheer obsequiousness of the corporate media and their willingness to lie on behalf of a corrupt political establishment was shocking, to see the least. But perhaps what was even more disturbing was the ease with which seemingly intelligent photographers and photojournalists agreed to participate and collaborate with the propaganda machine.
Many of the men and women who had once been my inspiration for becoming a photojournalist were now standing alongside illegal occupation armies and whitewashing their crimes and their occupations. By 2008, this crass allegiance to those carrying out war crimes and systematic destruction of entire societies became too much. Despite being an unknown voice and a small-time photojournalist, I decided something had to be said. The blog was born to share my concerns and critiques with a few friends. I doubt if it ever had a broad reach, but it did have some.
Although the Decolonize Journalism manuscript was written based on my writing on The Spinning Head, it goes far beyond the issues I covered in the latter. My main interest back in the day was a critique of the practice of US photojournalists and their collaborations with state-sanctioned propaganda via publications such as Time Magazine, The New York Times and other such corporate media outlets. Then, as now, in the wake of planned and system genocide unfolding in Gaza, US media lost its moral compass and deviated from even a pretence of integrity and independence. Instead, it rushed to embed with military forces carrying out illegal invasions, massacres, and torture and repaint them as heroes and liberators. The Decolonize Journalism material, however, tries to generalise and speak about the practice of journalism, of which photojournalism is merely a subsidiary and derivative practice, and the prejudices and mythologies that inform and distort it.
I was advised by many not to publish the manuscript online. I was advised to approach other publishers. I decided not to do that. These essays are best made available for free because they were written not as a means to a financial end but as a way to share what I learned about the workings and methods of Western journalism. It was written for writers, editors, journalists and photojournalists from the Global South, those outside the confining and stultifying prejudices and arrogant assumptions of Western editors and writers. It was written to help them understand how Western media operates and the ideologies that inform its structure.
And whereas there are many critiques of the field, many emanating from hundreds of journalism departments across the USA, Canada and elsewhere, most remain married to many of the unexamined mythologies of the discipline. At best, these critiques aim for reform and adjustments to professional practices, assuming that all that needs to be done is make some improvements, adjust some techniques, and add some ethnic diversity. The problems of Western journalism are far deeper, and such cosmetic changes will not have any impact.
The essays will emerge here over some months. I hope they will be helpful and educational for a new generation of writers and journalists. I know that most of them already know much of what I will post here, but I hope they will read it nevertheless. Western media has revealed its truth in the wake of the unchecked genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, a genocide that continues unabated as I prepare this work. We have been left bereft and shocked at the blatant disregard for truth, decency, honesty and human life that Western media outlets have demonstrated. Their callous and obsequious parroting of Israeli lies, their whitewashing of Israeli war crimes, their encouraging the ongoing slaughter, and their silencing of Palestinian history of resistance, struggle and search for liberty are perhaps among the starkest proofs of their complicity with power and genocidal violence itself. They have rightfully been accused of being complicit in the genocidal violence now unfolding in Gaza.
There can be no going back from this.
Please support the writing of this work. It is a labour of love, but it is labour. I am not asking for anything, but if you find what I write here helpful and use it in your work and within your institutions, please donate and help keep this work going. This is copyrighted material, and I would appreciate it if when you do share it you do give the author due credit.
Please feel free to share it and use it however you see fit. It is meant to provoke reflection, discussion, debate and sharing of experiences and knowledge. It is intended to confront Western journalism’s failures and find a new way of working and, in particular, better, more honest and humane methods of speaking about our people, communities and struggles for liberation.
Biography:
Asim is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Social Anthropology at the TUDelft in The Netherlands. His research focuses on the oceanic epistemologies and relational cartographies of Gwadar’s mahigeer community.
Previously Asim worked as an independent photographer, writer, and researcher. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Time, Harper’s, Stern, Tanqeed, National Geographic (France), and other publications. He has produced long-term works from Pakistan, India, West Bank & Gaza, and Haiti. He began his career in 2003 and has since reported from Haiti, Japan, India, Pakistan, the USA, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, Burkina Faso, and Sweden among other places. Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, he moved to New York in 1984 to study engineering at Columbia University and later took his MBA from Columbia Business School. His professional and personal life has required a nomadic lifestyle–New York, Los Angles, Boston, Lahore, London, Munich, Bangkok, Delhi, Stockholm, and most recently, Kigali, have all been home at some point in the last fifteen years.
Asim received an Open Society Fellowship in 2012 for his work on the project “Law & Disorder: A People’s History of the Law In Pakistan.” In 2015 Asim received a Magnum Foundation grant for his chapter on the “disappeared” in Baluchistan. He was a Fulbright Fellow to India in 2010/2011, where he worked on a long-term project called “The Idea of India,” and recipient of the Aftermath Grant in 2009 for this work.
Asim was an Artist–In–Residence at the LUMS Gurmani School of the Humanities in Lahore in 2012, where he taught workshops and participated in seminars and panels related to law and justice issues in Pakistan. He founded the Pakistan Photo Festival’s (PFF) photography mentorship program in 2017 and continues teaching in Pakistan, UAE, and Sweden. In 2017 he along with Suchitra Vijayan founded The Polis Project, a humanities collective that brings together research, reportage, and resistance to produce and give visibility to bodies of work that directly impact public discourse.
Asim is completing his PhD in Social Anthropology from TU Delft, The Netherlands. His research focuses on the sensory epistemologies of the mahigeer of Gwadar, Balochistan, in Pakistan.
Grants & Fellowships
Magnum Foundation Grant 2015
Artist In Residence, LUMS, Gurmani School of the Humanities, 2013
Open Society Fellow, 2012/2013
Fulbright Fellow, 2011
Aftermath Grant Winniner, 2009/2010
Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting Grant, 2008/2009
Aftermath Grant, Finalist, 2006