Spare the media

MQM leaders have once again reiterated their assertion that they are being ignored by the media (and parliament and the army) after submission of resignations to the National Assembly, Senate and the Sindh Assembly.
The party has not been so out of the media as the Awami National Party and other ethnicity-driven parties. In some respects, it is even more in the media than national parties.
That most of the times it is ‘in’ is for all the wrong reasons is the case in point. Calling it a ‘media trial’, the party leaders give the impression that all this is part of a thought-through plan to push them to the wall. Is that right?
More often than not, media and communication students from Interior Sindh question if Karachi stands for the entire province. Similar questions about Lahore are hurled by those from Balochistan and southern Punjab.
I explain to them that the media industry is not so resourceful as to cover every nook and cranny of the land but it is doable for it to focus on the bigger cities, which of course is not an ideal situation. Is it a crime to live away from big cities? If not, why they are not given their due on media?
By dint of being based in the country’s biggest city, the MQM always gets a lion’s share of media coverage. Other political parties have objected to the media giving this Karachi-based party more than its due. The party relies heavily on mainstream media and its rivals like the PTI give it a dribbling on social media. Despite that, it has not turned its attention to the internet in a befitting manner.
In a recent discussion in Karachi on ‘Conflict of Interest’, arranged by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), a participant from Wall Street Journal said her parents come from two different nationalities and one of the motives behind media outlets to hire international staff is to do away with ethnic and other biases. Her argument is applicable when exploring whether the MQM is being put in a negative light by the media on purpose.
How? The Pakistani media has a considerable number of professionals at key positions from different ethnicities rooted in Karachi. So the ethnicity card does not work for the MQM as far as the media is concerned.
The concept of objectivity, as we know it, is obsolete. The latest in information technology has not only changed our lifestyle but also media ethics. Long before the advent of this kind of IT, the concept of interpretative reporting had belied claims of journalists about being objective.
It has been agreed that we develop biases that guide our ways of looking at the developments taking place around them. To have biases is human but to hide them is not. Now journalists adopt different story-telling techniques to keep audiences glued to their work from start to end.
It has happened on many occasions in the modern media that known journalists have announced that they are holding themselves back from taking on a certain issue due to the biases they have for or against it. This is the ethical way to do it – live as you are. There are, on the other hand, incidents when journalists tried hide their biases and stakeholders proved them, putting up undeniable evidence. This is an awkward situation. No such incident, however, has come to the surface with regard to the MQM.
At this point, we are able to draw the picture on a broader canvass. Prominent media researchers take the news media as one entity when studying trends in politics. Making claims of a media trial, MQM leaders have also taken the media as one unit – without making a distinction between different media houses.
Seen from this perspective, generalisation, normally considered a negative trait, is a bliss. Media adopts generalisation to cater to as much audience as possible. Left in the dark in this process are some sophisticated aspects of social groups, especially those that are already threatened – minorities, women and children.
But in the MQM’s case, the good thing is that this process does not leave much room for the media to come up with manipulations in a big way for big social groups; though, it is done subtly. Popular media is generally like this, with some exceptions. So nobody with the slightest understanding of media practice can buy the MQM argument that the media is deliberatively giving it negative coverage. Maybe it is time for the MQM to do a little soul-searching instead of holding a mirror to the media.
The writer is a PhD candidate in media studies.