The Economist - of believing much and knowing little

Foreign correspondents and the publications they work for often face a dilemma: How to suggest omniscience in their reports about a country of which they know not much on the basis of a few conversations with the locals and a jigsaw of media headlines?

The omniscient pose is difficult to bring off, especially by weekly news magazines that revel in a format that condenses the news and melds it with comment.

While these first drafts of history - as one founder of the genre (Henry Luce) grandly suggested this journalism was - may have width in terms of its coverage of the world, that strength may be vitiated by a lack of depth.

The international news weeklyThe Economist takes its style from Walter Bagehot, its mid-19th century editor-in-chief, but there are times when the strains of its imitation of Bagehot's arresting blend of aphoristic statement with enlivening fact do starkly show.

Its coverage of Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim's acquittal earlier this week from what would have been a career-stifling charge of sodomy is an example of too many conclusions floating around unsupported by a substratum of fact.

Most glaringly, The Economistsaid that Anwar, despite the Kuala Lumpur High Court's acquittal of him after a trial of two years that was lurid in its details, has hadhis reputation tarnished.

PKR still a fledgling party

The ad hominem conclusions in The Economist's Anwar coverage were rendered the more trivial by a remark that at the age of 64, Anwar "seems a distant and untrustworthy figure to many younger Malaysians."

The irony here is mordant because Anwar's supporters contend the reason his eventual accuser so easily inveigled himself into the cohort around Anwar was that young Malaysians, particular Malays, are attracted to the man's struggles for political change and are drawn by his charisma.

Anwar is a magnet, especially to the more idealistic among the younger Malaysian set, which is why his party is poised - Anwar had recently confirmed this - to field a high proportion of youthful candidates in the impending general election.

This young slate would be the reproof of The Economist's opinion that Anwar has "failed to nurture a new generation of opposition leaders" in PKR.

At just under 13 years, PKR is a still fledgling party that required the rallying focus of Anwar's wife, Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, to hold it together as he fought off corruption and sodomy charges.

Anwar's now 14-year struggle - seen against the longer background of his stature built up from his youth as a paladin for political change - has had the effect of not only uniting hitherto electorally weak, and ideologically disparate, political parties in Malaysia's first-past-the-post system, but it has also drawn a wide array of NGOs and other activists to the banner of reform.

He can be seen as old and superannuated only in the sense that Aung San Suu Kyi, who is of the same age, may be seen in the same way in Burma's politics.

A deeply entrenched, sclerotic system takes a long time to buckle to popular pressure - Anwar's 64 years is old only in the sense that the African National Congress' Nelson Mandela was the same when he became his country's president in his late 70s in the mid-1990s, by which time South Africa's apartheid system was as old as the century.

The Umno-dominated and warped system of governance in Malaysia is a little more than a half-century old, enough time for it to be barnacle-like in its hold on power. Advancing age is not a disqualifier for someone striving to have the system jettisoned.

Is Anwar like a banyan tree?

Unlike other points of its coverage, The Economist is on less precarious ground in its observation that Anwar has not modernised PKR and "has allowed it to become something of a family-run affair, driven by infighting."

But even there the weekly's comment has to be seen against the backdrop of the young sapling that Malaysian democracy is and PKR's relative newness as a political force.

PKR is an assembly of disparate political, social and religious factions that needs time to jell into a coherent whole. True, Anwar bestrides it like a colossus but the jury is still out on whether he is like a banyan tree, no other sapling can grow under its shade.

Enduring political parties in parts of Asia that have quasi to fully democratic forms of government are family-fostered, from the Nehruvian Congress to the Lee Kuan Yew-nurtured PAP.

A nascent people on a continent whose ancient cultures and religions are not exactly hospital to the concept of individual responsibility for one's destiny require the mystique of larger-than-life figures for long periods before they can come into their own.

Anwar is acquainted with the best that has been said and thought in the realms where democracy has taken hold over the last few centuries which brings us to the gaping omission in The Economist'sevaluation of him.

This is the fact that his entire career is tied to a world-historical concern: whether Islam is compatible with democracy, the zeitgeist issue of our times.

It's an issue of epochal significance and the fact that after the verdict, he travelled to countries as religiously disparate as India and Turkey to speak at conferences where he is viewed as a Vaclav Havel-like figure is testimony of his category confining-transcendence.

Walter Bagehot, who expanded the sweep of The Economist's news coverage from national to transcontinental extents, would have understood Anwar's quest and breadth.