Our media: some final thoughts —Munir Attaullah
This business of cringing and exaggerated deference to religiosity seems to bedevil us at every step of our lives. The electronic media has given it added impetus
A vibrant, independent media demands, and attracts, high quality human resources: their sober example, their searching questions, and their balanced views, comments, and reporting will, surely — and quite rapidly — percolate through society to salutary effect. In particular, I am confident the satellite channels will have a healthy and liberating impact on the mindset of that section of our public who is presently a prisoner to an Urdu Press sadly out of sync with the rest of the world.
But some aspects of the electronic media have me worried. Let us begin with the anchors and presenters, who are the vital interface between the channel and the viewer. Obviously, much depends on the agenda they set, the participants they choose, and their own skills as moderators, in determining the content, and the clarity, of the message that comes across. So anything less than the highest degree of professionalism here is an automatic cause for concern.
You might say it is unrealistic to expect such high standards so quickly. You are probably right. So I will be charitable rather than overly critical, and not indulge in that invidious business of actually naming names. Except to say that Talat Hussain of ARY, and a handful of others, show it can be done.
So I will stick to some general observations. It is not for nothing that they say a journalist is a frustrated politician in disguise. The temptation to indulge in longwinded monologues, in which the presenter puts forward his own views, albeit disguised as a question to his panel, is hard to resist. Many have yet to learn this first lesson of professional broadcasting.
Then there are those who love playing to the gallery. In grilling officials and politicians in the presence of a studio audience, hard and complex issues are simplified to soft and basic emotional levels. Of course the moderator should represent the public in such encounters, and ask the difficult questions: what, if anything, is being done about the environmental degradation and pollution in our cities? How long must the public endure a wretched law and order situation? What gives with the Parliament? And so on. At the same time he must be fair, for surely he knows that every conceivable factor, from rapid urbanisation and mushrooming population, to pathetically inadequate government resources, militates against any significant improvement in urban living conditions for decades to come. More to the point, have you ever heard a word about how an ignorant, uncaring, and lacking in elementary civic sense, population, recklessly adds to the problems of officialdom? The impression left is that everything is always the fault of the government. But is it?
When someone from the studio audience asks, to prolonged applause, how is a man supposed to house, feed, clothe, and educate his wife and 5 children on a salary of Rs.3000 pm, should not he be asked in turn why he had not thought of such matters before producing those kids?
Or take the case of that other favourite question constantly posed to our elected representatives by the media: when will they begin to ‘deliver’ to the people who elected them? If I ever heard a ‘when will you stop beating your wife?’ type question, this is it. For surely any moderately sensible person knows that the primary function of a legislator is not to ‘deliver’ handouts, goodies, or even jobs. It is to participate in, and influence, through lawmaking, such state policies that affect us all in a general way. True, legislators, being part of the ‘power’ lobby can often network effectively to promote a specific home constituency project, or intervene with the authorities on behalf of an issue or a constituent, and so ‘deliver’. But what can an MNA do, especially in the short term, about lack of water, electricity breakdowns, unemployment, crime, or inflation?
If the public does not pay taxes, steal electricity, breed like unthinking rabbits, and is generally ill-equipped to be productive in a modern world, there is precious little the elected representatives can do to meet its unrealistic demands. Have you ever heard any presenter ask why we as a nation live beyond our means? Why we choose hopelessly ambitious agendas based on our dreams, which our limited resources cannot ever justify? Why advice on how to prepare for the hereafter is plentiful, but not a word on how to prudently plan for tomorrow?
To encourage the illusion, in an ill-informed public, that were it not for our ‘corrupt’, ‘inefficient’ and ‘feudal’ masters, Pakistan would be heaven on earth, is a recipe for public disenchantment and social anarchy. And a society becomes dysfunctional without respect for the law and the government.
Finally, there is this business of cringing and exaggerated deference to religiosity, which seems to bedevil us at every step of our lives. The electronic media has given it added impetus. Now I have no problem at all with dedicated religious channels; have as many as you want. And, given the importance of religion to our populace, I can also understand the hard commercial reasons that prompt all channels to have many religious programmes. But must we have ‘an Islamic point of view’ on every subject under the sun? And have you ever seen a moderator ask a maulana on the panel, a hard or awkward question, or dismiss his answer as evasive or specious?
Dr Shahid Masood of ARY is sober, intelligent, thoughtful, fluent, and articulate. Qualities anyone would envy. But, like the political bias of Mr O’Reilly of Fox News, his deeply held religious views cast their long shadow over all his programmes. Naïve that I am, I thought broadcasters have the elementary responsibility to be as transparently objective as possible. And the first rule here is to keep your own views and beliefs firmly under wraps. Otherwise you may as well go the whole hog and invite Dr Israr, Maulana Masood Azhar, or even Osama bin Ladin to host political talk shows. As for Dr Masood’s latest effort — “The End of Time” — currently showing on ARY, the less said the better. Four instalments, each an hour long, come complete with sombre background music, appropriate footage lifted from old Hollywood biblical epics, and dramatic scenes of natural disasters of all sorts, illustrating the Quranic stories of God’s implacable wrath visited on the unbelievers. The whole mish-mash (including the radical interpretation that the one-eyed Dajjal equates to the uni-polar world of American power today) is in support of the theory that the day of judgement is ‘finally’ at hand.
That has been a common enough prediction throughout History. Should you care to stroll through the speakers’ corner in Hyde Park, you are more than likely to encounter placards carrying the same message. What frustrates an innocent like me is — prudently or cunningly — no one ever seems prepared to give an approximate date for the great event. And Dr Masood’s incisive piece of research left me no wiser.
Munir Attaullah is a businessman |
