By Kamran Rehmat/Islamabad
Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani last week assured the government had no plans to curb the freedom of the media. His statement followed reports that the ruling Pakistan People’s Party was planning a stringent code of conduct for the media.
In a smart move, news managers of eight top Pakistani television news channels themselves formulated a guideline for field and live reporting, viewer exposure to extreme and disturbing visuals, bodies, badly injured people, accounts of the emotionally distraught as well as eyewitnesses, and real-time decisions on releasing information during war (or warlike situations) or in the case of hostage taking.
Despite the prime minister’s clarification, elements within the government have been gung ho about a clampdown on media coverage.
As an editorial in the left-leaning Daily Times observed, any such move would be a mistake. “In the current media environment, criticism cannot be censored the way it could have been before the advent of the electronic media, especially the Internet, and the government would be harming its own credibility if it goes down that path,” the paper warned.
Media in Pakistan has arguably never been freer. There is more real-time coverage of current affairs than ever. The prime time is hogged by political talk shows rather than entertainment. More information than ever is being generated and consumed in Pakistan’s history.
This is largely due to the opening up of the airwaves to private ownership a few years ago, which led to a dramatic increase in pluralisms and number of local language media as well.
Consequently, fierce market competition is kicking in the primal instinct of sensationalism over substance — all feeding a hunger for information for 170mn people, who have until a few years ago been starved of independent news as a matter of state policy.
However, it is a case of questionable journalism when reporters and commentators become part of the story, drop ethics of reporting in favour of sensationalistic minute-by-minute coverage of the aftermath of suicide bombings.
The hysteria and panic is widespread each time this has happened in the last few months. If this was not enough, the live coverage is followed by fear and hysteria-mongering analysis during periodic news bulletins, prime time talk shows and late-night analyses — all backed by disturbing footage from earlier in the day.
Most times of the day people are being either flooded with sound bytes of the possibilities of more terror attacks or visuals of old ones.
All of this, ironically, plays right into the hands of the militants. In fact, reviewing the coverage of terrorism and conflict of the last few months in particular, an argument can be made that the militants have come to ‘use’ the media as their instrument of terror and fear.
Even as the government has been on high alert across the country with emphasis on security of all manner of installations and places that are likely targets, the militants have evolved their strategy of putting new kinds of pressures to counter the crackdown on them by the state.
They are clearly staging “media events” designed to sow terror and fear into peoples’ hearts that can not only bring them regular and optimum coverage but by causing bloodshed and mayhem on a large scale, they hope these can help turn the public pressure on the government to scale down the crackdown. This is a decidedly psychological warfare.
The patterns are clear: big-scale attacks are being staged that employ over 50kg of explosives to maximise death and destruction. The attacks are being staged in major cities such as Lahore, Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad where not just the population but media density is also high, ensuring that a large number of reporters will reach the attacked sites virtually immediately for live and sustained coverage.
To ensure that the media play ball, the militants have also been repeatedly threatening its members to ensure that they crank out even more coverage of terrorism.
In at least the attack on military headquarters (GHQ), they managed to achieve their objectives to a great degree — sustained, intense coverage of the act spread so much fear that for days the media’s collective news agenda was crowded out by this one act.
It is hard to not believe that the attack on International Islamic University in Islamabad was tailor-designed to up the ante on the psywar on the people and government.
Finding that staging long-duration “media friendly” hostage events was not too easy, the militants struck at the university to maximise fear through live coverage of a diabolically unique act of terror.
The girls section was deliberately targeted through suicide bombing to ensure plenty of media coverage that would heat several social weak spots and cultural sensitivities: an educational institution was attacked, which would pile on the nerves of the government; students would be killed, which would horrify and terrorise parents; girls would be killed and injured, which would further break all kinds of taboos.
And predictably, the media — even if unwittingly — played right into the hands of the militants by “obliging” them with a media event designed to sow fear and terror on all these counts by their unthinkingly no-holds-barred live coverage of the immediate aftermath coverage.
Clearly, indiscreet live coverage of the wave of terror sweeping Pakistan and related general extremist interpretations and opinions on a media that is reaching millions of homes in real time is contributing to a more fearful and uncertain milieu.
The voluntary code of conduct embraced by Pakistan’s top TV channels could not have come at a better time. |
