by AFIYA SHEHRBANO ZIA
Survival is hard for traditional media these days and not because of boring economic reasons, but precisely because it’s traditional. Social media, on the other hand, defies old world economics. The BBMs exchanged between Husain Haqqani and Mansoor Ijaz make ‘cooler’ reading than the contents of the memo itself. Traditionalists discuss the prosaic memo and worry over how it threatens our sovereignty yet again. The revelatory contents of WikiLeaks did not redefine global politics but Julian Assange did confirm that the globalisation of media (and hacking) is a more powerful social imaginary than nations and their petty political dealings. The Haqqani-Ijaz exchange makes for an entertaining episode of Spy vs Spy. However, only the moral crusaders of the Pakistani media could expand a diplomatic intrigue into a full-blown matter of old world identity politics involving national pride, honour and sovereignty.
Normally, for the moralising journalists, our national pride depends exclusively on rejecting American interference. But in the case of Ijaz, they are willing to consider him as an exceptional American. They afford him the legitimacy he so obviously craves. Mr Haqqani’s own narcissism notwithstanding, the diasporic with verbal diarrhoea (that, too, in an American accent) is perhaps the most unattractive species of them all.
The Express Tribune for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)