The West’s ’legacy media’ and cultural products might be suffering from what is often called ‘institutional inertia.’ Recently, they have been using old conceptual understandings of a world that is fast being changed by new realities. According to the American sociologist William F. Ogburn, this condition occurs when “mental models” fail to adjust to rapid shifts in the material and geopolitical reality.

In the context of the 21st century, this inertia is particularly visible in Western media’s refusal to acknowledge the erosion of long-standing hegemonic narratives, especially those concerning American power, the state of Israel, the emergence of assertive ‘middle powers’, and the reshaping of nations such as Pakistan.

The response of Western media and cultural products to the sudden waning of the traditional Israeli victimhood narrative provides a primary example of institutional inertia. For decades, Western media and Hollywood operated within a framework and paradigm that instinctively cast Israel as a vulnerable democratic outpost in the Middle East, surrounded by hostile players that are hell-bent on wiping out Israel.

According to the Palestinian-Turkish academic Ahmet Alioglu, this narrative was reinforced by an “institutional editorial logic” that humanised Israeli suffering while rendering Palestinian people as either invisible or viewed only through the lens of terrorism.

As global power shifts and narratives evolve, Western legacy media remains trapped in outdated frameworks. Its inability to recalibrate reveals deeper institutional inertia that risks rendering it irrelevant

But things in this regard are shifting. Data from the 2024 Harvard CAPS-Harris Polls has shown a stark age-gap in the perception of Israel. The data confirms that Americans aged 18–24 are the first generation to view the Israel-Palestinian conflict primarily through the lens of “oppressor vs oppressed” rather than “vulnerable democracy vs existential threat.”

Yet, the institutional inertia within Western media lies in the refusal to recognise that for the generation under 30, Israel’s victimhood narrative has been replaced. To most young Americans, seeing an advanced and aggressive military power being framed as a vulnerable victim creates severe cognitive dissonance.

Filmmaker Raoul Peck’s recent and much-hyped documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 deconstructs the Orwellian newspeak and doublespeak of Vladimir Putin’s Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine, but casually fails to apply the same Orwellian scrutiny to the Israeli militarist regime. By selective application of the totalitarian label, the film follows a traditional hierarchy of villains, demonstrating that even recent critiques are often drawn from a map of the world established in the 20th century.

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Khomeini, Saddam, Qaddafi, et al: these are the usual culprits. In Peck’s film, Donald Trump too makes multiple appearances. But there is no mention of Benjamin Netanyahu, a virtual dictator who is sought by the International Court of Justice for committing war crimes.

In a review of the documentary on Counterfire, author and activist Elaine Graham-Leigh wrote, “Gaza and Lebanon are mentioned, but there is comparatively little about Israel, which, considering the centrality of questions like how states lie to promote their interests, seems like a pointed omission.”

Indeed, it can be a “pointed omission”, one which is driven by the institutional inertia that a lot of Western journalists and cultural products are struggling to break out of. But many may even be unwilling to let go of the narratives that were so carefully crafted and curated for them years ago. The fear of being labelled as ‘anti-Semitic’ is always there as well.

It is becoming quite apparent that Western media often overlooks how much things are changing. And I’m not talking about tech stuff. I’m referring to how Western media continues to view rising nations such as Türkiye, Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia etc as minor players who simply follow orders from the West. The fact is, these states have become assertive ‘rule-shapers’ that exercise significant soft power and diplomatic autonomy. They are no more the ‘rule-takers’, or at least not as much as Western media likes to believe.

On the other hand, Hollywood’s inertia continues to treat non-Western cultures as spaces populated by chaotic and even idiosyncratic caricatures. However, the emergence of the ‘Korean Wave’ or Turkish media exports, for instance, is representing a challenge to this imagination.

It is a process that the media scholar Dal Yong Jin describes as “counter-hegemonic.”

But legacy Western institutions struggle to categorise these changes as anything other than a temporary occurrence, failing to account for what the professor of media Koichi Iwabuchi identifies as the rise of “asymmetric global cultural centres” that no longer require Western validation to thrive.

The Western perception of Pakistan is a further case in point. Despite the country’s shift towards geo-economics and its role as a strategic broker in the current multipolar world, Western reporting on Pakistan is frequently governed by a crisis loop that focuses on imminent collapse and radicalisation.

This framing ignores the reality of a tech-literate, urbanised youth population and a nation that maintains strategic autonomy by refusing to join a specific geopolitical bloc. By filtering a changing Pakistan through the decades-old lens of a security state, Western media exhibits what the American political psychologist Philip Tetlock identifies as a form of “expert overconfidence.”

This mindset assumes that, because a narrative worked for decades, it remains valid regardless of the transformation of historical conditions. The most ironic bit in this regard includes Indian commentators who peddle themselves as ‘Pakistan experts’ to find space in Western legacy newspapers. They, too, have to embrace the inertia, even though they often mention Imran Khan to exhibit their updated take on Pakistan. But there’s a slight problem in this. Realistically speaking, Khan has very little to do with the Pakistan of 2026.

Recently, this lag was exemplified by an article on Khan by the Indian journalist Rana Ayyub in The Washington Post. It would’ve had more relevance two or three years ago. It’s completely out of sorts in 2026. Who has Ms Ayub been talking to in Pakistan?

Pakistanis, of course. But here’s the problem: the sources that Western media has within Pakistan have remained largely unchanged, with the same individuals applying outdated lenses to their own country. These folk are often trapped by their own inertia, perhaps fearing that challenging the established perceptions of their Western employers would lead to their professional abandonment.

This often creates a self-perpetuating cycle, where local intermediaries reinforce the stereotypes that scholars such as Edward Said identified as essential to maintaining Western “narrative hegemony.” Western media and cultural institutions now risk speaking to an empty room, while the rest of the world adopts a language of transformation and multi-polarity.

Time to let go of fading narratives and catch up.

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 3rd, 2026