Pakistan’s Own Foe: Its Media
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“A free press is not a privilege, but an organic necessity in a great society… A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.” - Walter Lippmann
Thomas Jefferson, America’s 3 rd President, once famously said, “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers”. What do the people of Pakistan read and watch most: lies and their glamorized enactment. Half-baked truths, tilted presentation of facts and ground realities; brutal, personal competition among the TV anchors to be the “first” in the breaking of news, which often turns out to be a trivia; or a reportage on a blast, or the rape of a child. In short, Pakistan’s media is a major contributor to the confusion and disillusionment that has currently wrapped the people of Pakistan. Media has the potential to act as a weapon of “mass- destruction”.
Mr Saurav Karmkar is right when he tweets about the TV anchors. “What these anchors do on television is similar to what a bored aunty does… always ready to add fuel to the fire… commenting on unrelated matters with the intended objective of creating a controversy, similar to what a neighborhood aunty calls, 'chugli' ".
By the way who is an anchor? The term itself is as confusing as it is enigmatic. Time magazine of February 12, 2015 has shed some light on it, “On February 10, we learned that one of the most respected voices in the media would be leaving his anchor desk, as would one of TV’s biggest celebrities known for jokes and fake news. That it is not immediately apparent which part of that sentence refers to Jon Steward and which to Brian Williams…” The news clearly referred to Brian Williams, a serious journalist who had developed a surprising ability to disarm audiences on sitcoms and talks shows, and to Ron Stewart who perfected himself in the art of self-deprecating himself as well as others. What did Brian Williams do to get suspended without pay from NBC Nightly News? He had falsely claimed, on air, that “a helicopter he’d flown on in Iraq had been shot down by an RPG”. “Williams rise and downfall sum up the contradictions built into the term anchor, perhaps the most unglamorous title ever given to a glamour job. A ship’s anchor, after all, does its job under the surface, unnoticed. A news anchor’s job is to ride astride the prow of the network’s flagship and be seen. And Williams was the best of his generation at being visible, before he came unmoored.”
Compare William’s little exaggeration to what Pakistan’s TV anchors tirelessly project and present to the public through their hyperboles. These anchors in their fancy dresses in Pakistan, shamefacedly and without any fear and moral compunctions, indulge in promoting the sickening biases and prejudices of the network’s owners; foam-mouth in pleading the innocence of the politicians whose corruption tales are even self-evident to the elementary school kids; who promote hate-crime; indulge in defamation and slander and incitement. The juicier the distortions they make; the brighter they see the chances of their ascension in the employers’ eyes. Yasmeen Aftab Ali in her book, “On Media & Media Laws” writes that there is a lack of high level of accuracies; focus is on being the First to report, and not on being the most accurate and truthful… this has created serious credibility issues”. Different TV channels report widely different figures on the killing of innocent people and of the soldiers in the war against terror. Sensationalism is yet another issue; search for the juicier stuff is non-stop, such as rapes, kidnappings for ransom; terrorist attacks and the destruction caused by such attacks. Real issues remain unattended to.
Unbridled media has almost become a virtual Frankenstein. It is learned that the Visual Media is owned by the property tycoons, and a kind of manifest rivalry is traceable through these TV anchors who work for them. A. R . Khalid, a teacher of Journalism at the Punjab University in his book, “Communication Today”, writes, “The fact is the Pakistan journalists are anything but human. Most of them are the worst breed of parasites. Instead of helping the nation they seem hell-bent to suck its blood, to strip it to last drop and even to bargain national interest for the sake of personal aggrandizement. Their slogan about freedom (of press) is only a camouflage to squeeze personal benefits out of the state officials who spare no effort either to out-clever the journalists”.
Anchor Saafi invited Munawar Hussain of Jamiat e Islami to further inflict the inflicted people of Pakistan, by condemning them to hear, “soldiers killed on the border while fighting the terrorists are not martyrs”; Hamid Mir when attached in Karachi by an unknown group did not wait for a second and blamed the ISI for the attempt on his life. Everyone condemned the attack and demanded that the assailants be brought to justice; but one TV channel even rushed to demand the resignation of the DG of ISI. The whole issue became history, and it is business as usual.
Do people who by nature and trend are egotistical and self-centered, deserve to be TV anchors? One gimmick loving gymnast is now running a show called, “Neelam Ghar”. Had he taken the trouble of seeing himself in the mirror, dressed in fancy attires, he would have reformed himself way back. But for money and fame this buffoonery would continue to stay as a sustainable human ‘virtue”.
Oscar Wile once said, “There is so much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.” Serious readers and viewers take more interest in either reading the sports pages or just watch the sports channels first, because they at least show some human accomplishments, some human effort made in a healthy direction. Unfortunately, for the people of Pakistan, even those pages or channels have become barren fields.
Positive, constructive, pragmatic, and optimistic thinking has deliberately been eroded and damaged and even deliberately replaced with sickening cynicism by these TV pundits. They have done more harm to Pakistan than perhaps the terrorists. The terrorists created fear; these TV anchors created a mind-set through the dead and deadly news to the extent that people in Pakistan now just refuse to see that there could be a phoenix in the ashes that surround them. They say progress and growth is never ending because it is a process, and not an end in itself. In Pakistan, these anchors have so regimented the receptive minds of the people, that they now tend to take failure as a final act.
Pakistani people are in the firm grip of the Murphy Laws. Captain Murphy had been just apocryphal during the Second World War. Perhaps it happened due to an incompetent technician who did everything wrong that he put his hands on which constrained Ed Murphy to say, “If there’s any way to do it wrong, he (the technician) will”. That became the notorious Murphy’s Law. The salient features of this law are: if anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway. If several things can go wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will go wrong first; if you realize that there are four ways in which something could go wrong, and circumvent them, then a fifth way will promptly develop; and left to themselves, things go from bad to worse”.
Now name a positive thing that these TV anchors report or show in Pakistan. The other day, the BBC relayed a news of the existence of a tourist bus in Karachi. The project has been initiated by some creative minds, showing to the visitors, the real spirit of Karachi, its vibrant people and their untiring zest to keep the mind and soul together. The tourist bus shows to people what beauties this great city houses, even in the midst of all the ugliness.
In America the insatiable thirst of the American people is for self-praise; they are never tired of it. In Pakistan, it is for self-depreciation, for denigration; for denial and for slandering. It is a country where the media thrives on negativity. Even human relations are getting characterized by this virus. One of the constants of the people of Pakistan and of Muslims in general has been the avoidance of facts and ground realities. Though Islam greatly emphasizes on the need of “self accountability and self-correction” the practice largely remains a part of speech, and not of action. Self-righteousness is now being termed as a virtue. “There is always the foreign hand myth nurtured by overpaid and willfully ignorant TV anchors. The guests invited to educate the people are never some enlightened, unbiased university professors; some world-famous high-achievers; some independent thinking non-party intellectuals; some religious scholars who are able to relate religion to modern life issues; the guests invited are the people who can be likened to the labeled-bottles in a chemist’s shop- highly predictable hirelings. Names are not deliberately mentioned here because they are never absent from the TV talk shows. These ideologues with their harangues further add confusion to the already bewildered people with their “surmises”. One reason that the Taliban mentality flourished in Pakistan and religious tolerance dissipated was that the truth was never spoken. John L. Esposito in the preface to F. E. Peters’ book, "The Children of Abraham”, writes a wonderful sentence. “Religious pluralism and tolerance came late to Christianity. Christendom had no space for Jews, Muslims, and indeed other Christians who were regarded as schismatics or heretics. Islam did provide a space for Jews and Christians, recognizing them as People of the Book, those who had received God’s prophets and revelation.” How many times people hear this kind of truth about Islam from the ulema of Islam? What they hear is that Muslims are the chosen people, and that Allah has forgiven all their sins, current and past, because they are Muslims.
Pakistanis people remained capsuled in a delusionary bubble like zombies, brainwashed into believing that terrorism in Pakistan was the work of some “foreign hand”. It could be, but it was never absent from Muslim history. Even when various militant groups angry at Pakistan proudly claimed suicide missions against military and civilian targets, they were ignored with a statement, “No Muslim could kill another Muslim… it is the work of India, Israel, America or even that of Afghanistan and Iraq”. Now they have added the Saudis as well for aiding them with money, a charge to explain which the PM himself perhaps have had to go. One teacher teaching physics in Lahore reports, “Their invited guests such as retired Gen Hamid Gul, his son Abdullah Gul, and numerous cohorts confidently pronounced that suicide bombers were uncircumcised non-Muslims agents of foreign powers”. Were they an eye-witness to this nonsense?
Does nature always side with the hidden flaws? “When two things go wrong somewhere, they go wrong everywhere? If everything is going well, you have overlooked something.” These echoes of the Murphy’s laws are fully embedded in the mentality of the people of Pakistan. They have been fed, rather over-fed, on sad and dismal news in such a bloated manner and for so long that now they appear to have learned to live with them well. It is the absence of bad news that begins to itch them.
Even Bangladeshis appear to have beaten Pakistani here as well as in Britain. They have overtaken Pakistanis in most of the fields in Britain. Pakistanis have become so uncreative, and are so much locked in their own taboos that they do not think of doing anything better than driving taxis. Mian Nawaz Sharif in all the three stints of his premiership, turned a good portion of Pakistanis into taxi drivers. Who picked this idea of taxi driving as a main profession both in Pakistan as well as in Britain, Mian Sahib or the overseas Pakistan is a matter of guess, but it did become an easy way of earning cash money in both the places for Pakistanis.
Bengalis went into the hotel business; lived in government apartments, and in London. They did not make dumb choices of buying cheap houses in cities that had become non-industrial. Better interaction with people of vision; better access to better schools; better choices of business, and better ways of assimilation; all have put them ahead of most communities in Britain. According to the Economist of February 21, “70% of Bengalis got five good GCSEs, the exams taken at 16-much higher than the national average. Pakistani pupils do not fare too badly; they got 51%. .. Pakistanis have low employment rate; their household income is also lower than the Bangladeshis. Even Somalis are coming up in Britain through education; not the Pakistanis.
Bill Moyers in his book’s foreword writes, “We journalists write on the sand and speak into the wind, and usually by the morning after there isn’t a trace of what we wrote or said…” I tend to disagree with him. Words have sounds as well as meanings, and both impact people in a very lasting manner. Words can lead to collaboration as well as to competition. And human beings have advanced through collaboration more than through fierce competition. To this assertion of Bill Moyers I fully endorse. And Pakistan is a valid example of it. Alas for these anchor persons in Pakistan, Pakistanis are an item with skin wrapped around it.
