‘Hate Spin’, book launched at event co-hosted with CAMRI

At a recent launch event, Cherian George discussed his new book with Daya Thussu, Professor of International Communication, CAMRI, University of Westminster.

In the United States, Donald Trump’s campaign for the Presidency mainstreamed anti-Muslim rhetoric of a radical fringe Islamophobia network. In India, Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist supporters instigate academic censorship and vigilante violence. In Indonesia, Muslim absolutists attack churches and minority sects. These trends in the world’s three largest democracies and other outbreaks of religious intolerance are not random and isolated, but part of a dangerous pattern of politics that Cherian George calls ‘hate spin’. A two-pronged weapon of identity politics, hate spin combines incitement to hatred with orchestrated outrage against perceived insult.  Often mistaken for spontaneous eruptions of visceral emotions, hate spin episodes are manufactured by political opportunists to mobilise supporters and marginalise opponents. George argues that hate spin requires a public response that is at least as resolute as the campaigns engineered by modern purveyors of intolerance.

‘This timely work provides an essential warning against the misuse of perceived religious-based bias and an unmasking of the real motives of those who incite manufactured offense.’—Publishers Weekly

The author: Dr. Cherian George is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism at the Hong Kong Baptist University. A native of Singapore, he is a former art and photo editor at the Straits Times. Dr. George received his PhD in Communication from Stanford University. He has a Masters from Columbia University’s School of Journalism and a BA in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University. Among his other publications are Contentious Journalism and the Internet: Towards Democratic Discourse in Malaysia and Singapore (2006) and Freedom from the Press: Journalism and State Power in Singapore (2012). He is also editor of the Routledge journal Media Asia.

Discussant: Dr Daya Thussu is Professor of International Communication and Co-Director of India Media Centre as well as research advisor to the China Media Centre at the University of Westminster. Author or editor of 18 books, the latest being Communicating India’s Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood (Sage, India, 2016), he is the founder and Managing Editor of the Sage journal Global Media and Communication.

Image: CAMRI