We often hear that ‘Media/Press can play a very important role towards educating our public’. Is Pakistani media doing what we expect of it to do. Pls comment….
The question how much freedom the media should have by itself is a sufficient indicator that it has assumed a disturbing particularity for society and state. What are those harmful aspects? To know them one has to look at the spectrum of the people running the Pakistani media.
Our information environment is being run by five kinds of people:
- Chest beaters, who whip the national scene into despondency and want people to join them.
- Pessimists, who see nothing but calamities, problems steaming with no redemption in sight.
- Cynics, who repudiate everything, spreading negativity by ignoring the positive aspects.
- Intellectuals, who speak with an air of superiority and think they have the right to deprive people of their values, transposing them with a foreign agenda. They self describe themselves as progressive and rational.
- Optimists, who never miss an occasion to criticize the wrong but also see light at the end of the tunnel.
Besides, we have media czars who own print and electronic media sitting smug in their opulent offices counting money and garnering power regardless of the fact what their employees do.
The first four are seemingly sick but they are not. Beating chest, sketching dark scenarios, spreading despair, inducing skepticism and cynicism is their chosen path. That there is a method to their madness is evident from their proclaimed agenda. They insist on using their right to express in order to change the primary characteristics of the state.
In the psychological warfare when an enemy-state aims at destabilizing the other nation, the weapons used are mostly psychic, non-material, including spread of despair, negativity, cynicism, low self esteem, lack of confidence and disbelief in the future.
Likewise, those in tandem with their foreign sponsors keep on reinventing the wheel by resurrecting foundational issues settled in the Constitution in the past, followed by stirring them up repeatedly till they become controversial, eventually losing their sanctity. Evidently, the intention here is to unravel the unifying bond that keeps the nation together. And who can do it better than the media!
The secular lobby active in such pursuits is well known This is one side of the storm brewing, which no government really cared to tame or showed its grasp of the threat potential. The other feature is equally disturbing. In the conflict between the government and the media, the former clamps restrictions on it only when its nerves get tangled on the media’s criticism.
It is on some such occasion that the government points its accusing finger at the media for being irresponsible, asking it to stay within the bounds. The Peoples Party case is a different one for they want to do wrong and then desire that their dirty linen should not be exposed to the public.
In the past, Peoples Party came twice into power. And each time it was ousted on charges of corruption, nepotism, and maladministration. Luckily for them the media then did not enjoy the spread that it has now and most of their crimes remained hidden. In Benazir’s second term when stories involving the big ones in the party caught people’s imagination, someone made the unsightly observation that her administration’s performance was dismal and she might not have another chance at the polls, she blurted out: “Don’t you worry. Our voters do not read newspapers.”
Even today PPP has the same mindset. They think people are imbeciles and can be deceived and if the media stays neutral, their game of deception can continue.
The same by and large goes for the regional and ethnic parties. Their attitudes notwithstanding, the media’s phenomenal un-collared growth has bewildered other nations while the PPP has begun to watch media with extended nostrils and clenched fists: “The media,” a PPP minister said in the vocabulary reflective of our present times, “is carrying out suicide attacks on the government, in response we have resorted to its target killing.”
Obviously, it is not a good situation. When President Zardari says media should not criticize his administration and media retorts in matching tones as their right to say the disagreeable, or that they did not have their freedom free on a platter, the cleavage between the two becomes wide enough to bridge.
Ironically we may abound in pious intentions but when it comes to the golden principle of balance and moderation, we go bingo out on the limp. We insist on garnering authority and power beyond our right. In other words, we seek unbridled freedom for ourselves and restrictions for others.
For instance, for the last so many years there has been a lot of churning in the air about the code of conduct for the media but nothing came out of it. And when it was left to media to come up with a code of conduct for its own sake the result still was nothing.
The matter, however, is not that complex to have escaped solution provided the disputants had agreed to certain conditionality. To begin with, the government, despite its childish sensitivity, must consent to media’s right to expose its misdeeds before the people.
The government’s acute sensibility toward criticism by itself is a disease that together with the people, the media must cure.
A smart government, which considers itself responsible to the people, is not only keen to seek good counseling but also present itself for accountability. In the same vein, it also considers judiciary as its best friend. Together with the media and judiciary it improves its performance and its natural consort image.
Unfortunately, PPP has always suffered from contradictions. They consider a feudal administrative set up as people’s government and indulge into lawlessness; and then to save themselves from legal cognizance, seek cover behind the people. To them, if the people vote them into power, then they are beyond legal reproach. It is for this reason they tangle themselves with the media, show their eyes to the judiciary, and shout at the army.
In this conflict between the government and media, there is another unfortunate aspect that has surfaced. That is, when it comes to media’s criticism of the governmental inefficiency, the latter brandishes its sword to kill its tormentors. But when part of the media makes a scathing attack on the existence of the Pakistani state and repeatedly dares to annul the partition of British India on behest of its foreign sponsors, the government gives not a damn, even though laws are available under which such newspapers and TV channels can be punished.
This is all the more regrettable for it is the government primary responsibility to protect and safeguard the security and integrity of the state.
Media is certainly not innocent and often come up with thoughts which can at best be described as presumptuous with little relevance to law or even to common sense. For example, media people should take this absurd notion out of their head that the right to enjoy freedom is unqualified. Such freedom notion is hardly found on this planet, for freedom without an orbit, eventually leads to disorder and anarchy, weakening societies and nations.
Likewise, the media must also understand that if they have rights, the state and the Muslim society constituting it also have some rights. Also in this media-government conflict, there is a third party named the people of Pakistan, who are currently silent but inside simmer with anguish and rage. Some foreign sponsored newspaper columns, TV talk shows and plays are raising lot of questions in the people’s minds awaiting answers.
Alarmed, they ask what kind of people are they who find space in the print and electronic media, and which country they represent that they abuse the very existence of a state that shelters them, question its Muslim identity and its values. And what kind of owners and their employees are they who give them the chance to utter such filth....(continued)
Part 1-http://pakmediaalert.com/node/66 and Part 2- http://pakmediaalert.com/node/67
