A democratic system is the one and only hope for a nation and society and the media have a decisive role to play in this regard.
These views were aired by Professor Dr Tauseef Ahmed, visiting professor of the mass communications department of Karachi University, on Wednesday evening at a seminar titled, “Media crisis in Pakistan”, held at Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (SZABIST).
Tracing the history of the muzzling of the press in Pakistan, he said that there were laws of the East India Company vintage that continued all the way up until 1988. The state, he said, had three methods for achieving their anti-information agenda: black laws (many of the East India Company vintage), advertisements and newsprint, and press advice.
As for the black laws, he said these encompassed a whole lot of restrictive measures on reporting. This, he said, was a ploy to suppress the colonial movement or the interests of the foreign occupiers. These laws, he said, remained there in some form or the other up until 1988.
The second one, he said, was the weapon of advertisement. The rulers, he said, used advertisements as a weapon to make “errant” media fall in line. According to Prof Ahmed, as it is, the mainstay of newspapers is advertisements, which are the main source of revenue, and by cutting back on the volume of ads issued to a paper, they starve the publication of revenue so that the paper is forced to fall in line.
As for newsprint, he said, it is an imported commodity and hence not very easy to come by. It has to be subjected to a quota for every publication. So whenever the rulers felt that a publication was not “behaving itself”, they used the newsprint quota as a weapon, which affected their coverage.
“Private advertisements don’t bring in the volume of revenue as the government ones do. Hence one could well imagine the condition the papers are being subjected to.” Many issues, he said, were not highlighted in the vernacular press as this is the public pinion forming tool. He added that people were kept in the dark on many vital national issues.
Noted journalists and TV commentator Mazhar Abbas regretted that journalism today was agenda-driven, and often news was planted. The television phenomenon came to the country in an erratic way, and newspaper reporters did really hard spadework, he said.
Today, he lamented most journalists in the driving seat were not originally journalists. He blamed the current credibility crisis on this phenomenon. “The media will have to redefine and restructure themselves,” Abbas said and added that for one thing, they would have to bring in uniform and just salary structures and not just fix salaries of handpicked journalists at whim while others were made to make do with measly salaries.
Uzma Al-Karim of Geo TV said that what had had affected the newspaper industry was the digitalisation process. “From the electronic media, we have now moved to the social media.”
This, she said, often hit credibility hard as the social media were more subjective than objective and often were a matter of opinion. Besides, she said, there credibility could not be relied upon.
Mubashir Zaidi of Dawn TV said, “Our regimes all along have been repressive.” As for journalistic techniques, he said the journalists also had to brush them up for which detailed, painstaking investigation was essential.
“There have always been pressures and the best way to forestall these pressures is investigation at the micro level.” Karamat Ali, director, Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler), referred to the recent unfortunate episode whereby heavily armed men stormed the Karachi Press Club and harassed journalists, making videos of each and every nook and corner of the club.
He said it was a clear attempt by the powers that be to browbeat the journalists into tacit submission and create a feeling of terror among them. “The right to information is a natural right and if you’re organised but not duly informed, you shall be failing in your duty. Freedom of expression is the inalienable right of every human being.”