Who has the power to tell the story?

In his talk last night at Duke University (according to this morning's article in the Durham Herald-Sun), Salman Rushdie asked,

Who has power over the narrative? Who has the power to tell the story of our world and our lives?
    [Tyrants] will come after you and try to kill you [if you try to tell it another way than theirs].¹

    I was powerfully reminded of a brief passage in Harris that I almost included in yesterday's excerpt:

...would it be ethical for cows being led to slaughter to defend themselves if they saw an opportunity—perhaps by stampeding their captors and breaking free? Would it be ethical for a fish to fight against the hook in light of the fisherman's justified desire to eat it? Having judged some consumption of animals to be ethically desirable (or at least ethically acceptable), we appear to rule out the possibility of warranted resistance on their parts.... [p. 211 of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values]

Jonathan Safran Foer's graphic story² of the miserable life and death of factory-farmed (and other) animals unable either to defend or speak for themselves makes Harris's hypothetical questions so real for me, I despair anew at our tyranny over the animals we eat.
_______________

1. Rushdie's 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, drew protests from Muslims in several countries. The "Supreme Leader" of Iran, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, issued a fatwā (death sentence) against him in February 1989.
2. Eating Animals, 2009.