Media Unleashed
By Mowahid Hussain Shah

15 years since restraints on electronic media were loosened in Pakistan may be enough time to look at the scoreboard. Undoubtedly, there have been pluses including, but not limited to, focus on civil movements, amplification of public concerns, and an overall rise in sensitivity to the surrounding environment. People who hadn’t watched televised news now watch it. It has also enhanced job opportunities.
With benefits come burdens. More is not necessarily better. To date, the right balance has not been struck as to what to show and what not to show. There has been an evident dilution of quality. And there are no basic criteria for coming on television. Everybody can be an analyst and an expert on everything. Media has been riven by its own scandals, centered on issues of ethics, integrity and bias.
Has more media added value or is it just a rehash of stale items? Tweet trivia sometimes passes as breaking news. It reminds of the famous lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”
Lost in the commotion and trampled in the rush to sensationalize, pivotal nation-building issues of health, education, civility, rule of law, community service and etiquette have been bypassed. There now is a noticeable addiction to viewing politics as entertainment and contentious talk shows as dogfights wherein politicos vie with one another in revering their bosses and reviling their rivals.
The question needs to be examined: has mass media, as intended, made the nation more coherent and cohesive, or is it becoming more fragmented? Evidence suggests that polarization has sharpened and partisan divide has deepened. Rifts along ethnic, linguistic, sectarian and provincial lines have widened. And discourtesy has spread.
Witness the fate of proposed construction of the Kalabagh Dam. When politics is viewed as a spectator sport, core make-or-break governance issues bite the dust.
Despair is the dose that can leave in its wake a slow-motion fifth column-like demoralizing corrosion.
With commonweal issues remaining as, who then benefits? Apparently not the public. Attention span has slumped, along with erosion of vital reading and reflection skills.
Televised turmoil is not a remedy for a nation already gutted with agitational disputes. More heat doesn’t necessarily lead to more light.
Increased public awareness is the lollypop being sold to validate. Left largely obscured here in this noise pollution is the issue of fairness.
There aren’t easy options. In the United States, crass mass media has produced a crass Presidency. According to Obama, the parachute for Trump to land on the White House was provided by the 24-hour Fox News Channel and toxic social media.
Neil Postman, a noted social critic, had maintained:
“Television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation… It means misleading information – misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information. … Information now comes indiscriminately, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don’t know what to do with it.”
In a nutshell, the jury is still out on implications of an unleashed media.