When the news becomes news

If you happen to be carrying around schoolyard fantasies about the nobility of the profession of journalism, you must hold onto those. They are invaluable. Nothing was ever achieved without a little romance and a lot of prayer. But if you are unable to distinguish and separate between what motivates individual journalists, from what motivates capitalist collectives, corporations and business groups, you should have stayed at school. Pakistan's mass media is as diverse, as free, as profit-oriented and as imperfect as the next country's. The real reason why so much ink and so many bytes are being dedicated to the "problems" of the Pakistani media is not the media. It is Pakistan. Since Pakistan makes for such compelling copy, Pakistan's media was eventually going to become the story.

To be fair, there is a long list of issues that need to be worked on before Pakistanis can be complacent about the media from which they get their news--indeed, perhaps no country's people can ever be complacent about this. But compare 2010 to the year 2000 and the fog begins to clear. The current version of the Pakistani media is the most democratic and freedom-inducing thing that has happened to this country since the PPP was formed in 1967.

There is a healthy, if inadequate, degree of internal criticism and debate within the Pakistani media. Some of it is about issues that seem inane to wealthier Pakistanis, like journalists' pay--a serious issue if journalism is the only source of your subsistence. Some of it is about temporal issues, like the degree of graphic details that news channels will or won't show during live broadcasts. Most of the real debate takes place in newsrooms, and on editing desks.

The instances in which newspaper editors censor, or are forced to censor, their material is rare. So too are instances of active government or military interference with editorial policy. When it does happen, it generates intense scrutiny, within and outside the

news cycle. However, internal debate is not sexy. To conjure up more appealing storylines, and to make the Pakistani news business itself, the actual news requires a little creativity.

Indian army chief Deepak Kapoor (or in the spirit of the TOI-Jang Group's "Aman ki Asha" campaign, Disco Deepak) says what any Indian needs to know to be able to sleep at night (but usually doesn't), and the Pakistani media goes into overdrive. Hillary Clinton comes to town, and desi boys, wanting to flex their rotund patriotic muscle before the most powerful woman on the planet, get bellicose with their questions. Blackwater, it turns out, has been working in Pakistan all along, and the press gets even more infuriated with America's role in their country.

Somehow, it seems that things that should be assumed to be natural, organic and routine have become news when it comes to Pakistan. For example, why wouldn't the Pakistani press try to analyse what Disco Deepak is saying, given that it has spent more than 30 years trying to analyse generals and their speeches? Or why wouldn't Pakistani journalists want to ask probing questions, even with a measure of aggression, of a woman who commands the very foreign policy of the very country that itself claims to have its entire national security staked in the frontiers of Pakistan? Or, finally, why shouldn't Pakistanis and their informants--the mass media--ask questions about a notorious mercenary company that has essentially been given a carte blanche for extrajudicial killings by the expressed written consent of the US government in the past?

Those that hyperventilate about the tilt of the Pakistani media, it seems, are engaged in a fair bit of an ideological war themselves. Nothing particularly wrong with that, except that it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Fairness and balance would require more substance to support concerns about the tilt of the Pakistani media. Not to mention some acknowledgement of the tremendous strides the media has made in Pakistan. Not with the hyperventilating critical fringe, though. These all-in-one paragons of unparalleled intellectual prowess, gurus of public policy and ulema of moderate Islam, base their critique of the Pakistani media on the back of their expertise as music critics and science teachers. Not surprisingly, they tend to have the balance of over-the-limit drivers on New Year's Eve. Just because they seem to be more sophisticated versions of Fauzia Wahab does not make them more accurate than the PPP information secretary. It just makes them more dangerous.

That the scathing criticism of the Pakistani media (at home and abroad) is ideologically motivated, rather than by facts, doesn't mean there should be no criticism at all. That is why it's important that Pakistanis that have been probing the statements of Disco Deepak should be prepared to be at least ten times as probing of the next utterance of Gen Kiyani, who -- unlike Disco Deepak -- is leading an active war, as abstract and contentious as it may be.

It's important that Pakistanis that were so tough with Secretary Clinton should take their intellectual and verbal knives to the party the next time Foreign Minister Qureshi invites them to an inane lecture about his commitment to Pakistani sovereignty and India-Pakistan peace. Most of all, it's important that Pakistanis that are outraged by Blackwater's secret work in Pakistan should ask themselves why the Pakistani military, under the rule of their last leader, Gen Musharraf, allowed that company to work in Pakistan, in the first place.

But just because the Pakistani media is asking some of the right questions (and not all of them), doesn't de-legitimise the questions that are actually being asked.

A free judiciary is still a good thing. Movements for the rule of law, really good. Corruption? Still bad. And keeping one's promises, still good. If the PPP fails to stem corruption, and succeeds in breaking the most important political promises it made in the last decade, then asking tough questions of the PPP is a sacred duty, not ideological blabber. It is certainly not anti-state hatred for President Zardari.

Killing innocent people (assuming people are still innocent until proven guilty) through the dropping of bombs on terrorist targets is still a problem as a general rule. The term "collateral damage" can dehumanise human loss, but it can't blunt the pain of the losses suffered by hundreds of families and dozens of tribes in Pakistan's north. One need not be a fan of that tribal society, nor of terrorism, nor of Islam, or even of basic liberal values. One only needs to be human to empathise with the feelings of people who lose family members in explosions that are not their fault. If the logic of that human sentiment applies to victims of 9/11, of Bali, of March 11, of July 7, of the 26/11 terror in Mumbai, and if it applies to the deaths of the more than 2,800 shaheed soldiers of the Pakistani military, then it must apply to innocent victims of drone attacks.

Pakistan's media is guilty of being a microcosm of the society that it reports on, reports for and reports to. It is a reflection and an extension of Pakistan at large. That doesn't change its basic function. It is not the government. But it is a legitimate democratic institution. If there is an imbalance, it is that the new Pakistani media is a middle-class and a largely urban institution. If there's one thing that really gets the Pakistani elite, it is this gnawing, jabbering, complaining "middle class." No wonder the news is becoming the news.



The writer advises governments, donors and NGOs on public policy. He can be reached through his website