The following is a lecture delivered by Pankaj Mishra, winner of the 2024 Weston International Award, at the Royal Ontario Museum on September 16. —eds “In the beginning was the press and then the world appeared,” Karl Kraus wrote in 1921. The biblical allusion was no rhetorical flourish. Living through an apocalyptic era, the Austrian writer, and arguably the first major media critic, had reason to believe that journalism had moved from being a neutral filter between the popular imagination and the external world. It had taken charge of forging reality itself. Kraus’s critique had assumed sharper focus during World War I, when he began to blame newspapers for deepening the disaster they were meant to be reporting on.…