The News Corporation scandal that is now afflicting the British state provides an opportunity to take stock of "the West" in our time. Both in the mass media and in academic social science, the West has, for some time, been depicted as the site of governments that are stable and sober, not to mention representative. One trope in this regard is about how the societies of the West (unlike those elsewhere) are the beneficiaries of a long democratic tradition; and as an antithesis, there is the figure of the "banana republic." But let's turn from these imaginaries to the evidence. It turns out ( I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on at Rick's ) that the British government has, for many years, been in thrall to a gang of thugs minimally disguised as journalists. And then there's Italy, where a home-grown media-moghul has been running the state like a subsidiary of his corpo...
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