Turning the Idiot Box into a Useful Audiovisual Experience

"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads," George Bernard Shaw.
These words seem familiar. Aren't we living in a society where every word we read has a background? It is always essential reading, the most important thing. The audacity of expression is long lost, but we have also lost the courage to read what we wish, what is not essential reading, not a ‘must read’ in order to float easily in the sea of absurdity. Do we need to change? Yes we do. Reading the book nobody reads leads to indulgence in discourse nobody understands, though everybody approves. This brings the society at large into a circular discourse. The argument revolving around the news of the day. Thus, terrorism, power-tariff, corrupt politicians, and so on. This is the taste of our times. We have become men "of great common sense and good taste", social robots. We talk the talk most of the time. This makes us socially acceptable, but the cost is "originality and moral courage", as Shaw puts it.
Who leads this circle of anomalies? The media. The media is the book of our times. Every anchor is running a chapter.
We have become spectators of our own happenings. The lead role of the media is nothing new in sub-continent. This country has emerged and lived through confusing times. From the very onset there was a lot of external and unknown elements in the national discourse. The division of India, which became the Independence of India and Pakistan, entailed one of the biggest migrations in human history. Both of the new nations, Pakistan being newer than the counterpart, needed information about these deadly travels. The need was satisfied through the media and also literature, which until recently had the tragedy of the Partition as its most dominant theme. Even earlier the unification of Muslims across the globe remained one important theme for major Muslim thinkers/politicians, whose one important vehicle was the newspaper.
This defined the taste of the new nation as well as the role of its media. Current columns in Urdu newspapers are a continuation of this lead role. These roles are in dire need of change with the growth of private television, armed with live talk shows. The dominant discourse has also changed a lot. We are living in a state of war, with no definite enemy in sight. The common man doesn’t really know why his child can’t play around the way he did? What has changed? The structure of television gives us a great advantage to answer this and similar vital questions posed by the traumatised audience looking for guidance and fellow feeling.
The limitations of private TV are not difficult to understand. Private TV does know that it is the new book we all are supposed to read. What it doesn’t understand though is that due to a decade of training in self-censorship the very fabric of our self-proclaimed independent media is not fit to become the book we need to read. Private TV is new. It is not a time factor, but rather one of capacity. The workforce this medium is getting is mainly from print. Current lead TV anchors are people from print. They deal with audiovisual as they used to deal with print in the good old days. But their problem gets deeper when they are asked to do what they have never done in print, in their self-designed columns. It is live interviewing. Interview is the most difficult art for a media professional. Its scale gets even higher when it is audiovisual, reaching the highest when it comes to live interviews, and especially group interviews. This is what talk shows affecting many lives are all about. A fashion talk show is different from the ones that are based upon the day’s happenings and these are also being tragic, frustrating most of the time.
The first and foremost requirement for a TV show that provides its audience with content worth watching, is orientation training for the hot shots, known as prime time TV anchors. The men and women who have either a useless narrative, sarcastic style, or who imitate US talk shows. The aggressive style of many female anchors is nothing but an imitation of other countries. This is an ethical issue. These guys need to know the ethics of their job. This ethics is based upon social responsibility towards the audience; of not taking the audience as wet clay waiting to be moulded by the magic wands they carry in their words. They must understand the reason behind the whole media structure and specifically the needs of the Pakistani audience.
No matter how big the egos of the famous anchors, they still need training. They need an introduction to TV journalism, to the art of concept building for programs and then the selection of topics. This effort should be supported by intense audience research. This is something the whole world is doing except Pakistan. Audience research is an integral element of modern TV. It becomes an imperative when live talk shows aiming at day-to-day life affecting issues are aired.
Once they get this conceptual training they need to learn how to behave on this cool medium as Marshal McLuhan defined it quite early. It is harmful to shout on TV. It is counter productive for the participants, but fatal for the host. If the host remains aggressive all the time or tries to be sly, it won’t bring any good. There is one last genre that needs to be simply supplanted on the TV screen, no matter how useful he seems to be. This is the insipid narrator who poses as a historian, politician, philosopher, academician, reporter, philanthropist, human rights activist, and defender of national and religious ideology; the all in one package guy.
To cut the long story short it is high time to give the people their medium back. To make a serious effort in getting a TV for the audience. To give them a book to read that is everybody reads and understands.

The Media We Live In

"Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper," Khalil Gibran. We live in a world of exaggeration. A world blinded by megalomania. We are getting blind every passing day. Collective schizophrenia. It is one of the most dangerous ailments of all. But are we the only ones that are blind. We are surely the damned ones. Whatever goes wrong in the world we become the scapegoats. The world media paints a picture of Pakistanis like a people devoid of any moral obligations. Pakistani media borrows the pictures to strengthen the bias, giving a testimony against their own very people. It is true that "a good government with an adversary press becomes a great government." But the adversarial role doesn't mean borrowed spectacles. Adversary press is a press that confronts the powerful for the sake of the downtrodden; the wretched of the earth. Does Pakistani media play this role? Nowhere in sight. It doesn't own the audience, the very basic rule for mass communication.
Mass media in Pakistan mushroomed at the turn of the millennium. Idiot boxes multiplied through proliferation of private TV channels. 24/7 television is a beast that devours the existing and creates anew. Roots of Pakistani media are in the printed word, the newspaper. Newspaper industry got its vigor from anti-colonial movement, the struggle for Independence. Whenever we look back into history the stalwarts of solo journalism were all political activists. They were all using the only available media, newspaper, to further their political agenda, ideology. This made them watchdogs of political ideology, a befitting role for the times they were in.
It is also very natural to carry on this role after the establishment of the new democracy. Pakistani media remained political in nature after Independence from the British. It had to face the wrath of its new rulers, the custodians of faith and sovereignty. Muzzling the media remained the first priority of every government till date. Post-colonial Pakistan remained a pseudo democratic structure where the rich and the mighty entered the echelons of power through their might over the common man, though the facade of infrastructure conveyed government by the people image to the outside world. Media had to toe the line or perish. This lesson was repeatedly inculcated into the minds of the media by democrats and dictators alike. From beaming noise into radio speeches of the founders of the nation to nationalizing the vocal newspapers under the National Press Trust to the Printing and Publication Ordinance happened within less than 15 years of this nascent country.
Most of the mainstream got the message. The few defiant loners never mattered. State controlled electronic media, a very cautious press, and a lot of journalists forced to self-censorship are the products of the system.
Mushrooming of private electronic media brought a new power player into the game, namely PEMRA. Mainstream television has been seen as a larger than life phenomenon, capable of doing miracles to restore the democratic pride of not only the media but also the people. This is not going to happen. Big media is big business and big business is big money, needing more and more attention span of a viewer, baffled by the variety of audio-visual messages beamed into the bed rooms. Attention seeking turned the much lauded talk-shows into cockfights, sooner to become voices of the unknown by choosing trivia as topics of the day. Every TV channel set a stage for one or more cockfights, marketing the hosts and their discourse in a larger than life manner to overawe the idle recipients of the new audible-color.
Exaggerated accounts of distant happenings are systematically being beamed to people, packaged as idea of the day. As Nietzsche prophetically said more than a century earlier "Big lies are hung to small truths." This is very true for Pakistani TV. Though every debate begins with the people, it progresses and ends in abstraction. The anchor-host has the last word. And more than often this opportunity is used to give a personal message, which is either a sum total of the hour long cockfight, or something altogether out of tune with the debate. No matter which way it goes, it is never the people's way. True, it is packaged into a people's parlance, but the viewer always tries to find her/himself after the awe-inspiring demagogy.
The argument of "a new media learning the art of the possible" is no more valid. I think it is high time for soul searching, if there is any left in the so-called marketplace of ideas. Like the Pakistani nation, its TV audience is the source of all money getting into the journalist-businessmen-owner coffers. The audience should have their day. Media and media-men should learn to respect this truth. The only way to know the needs of the audience is to go through rigorous audience research, knowing what the people want to know. This is the first and most important step to avoid exaggeration that leads to loss of temper. There is a long way ahead to reach the point of knowing the art of doing a democratic, representative media. Playing the adversary to serve vested interests won't last long. It might, but it is not worth. Doing the right thing is nothing patriotic; it is professional. Experiments with exaggerations should give way to practicing the truth. This is the eternal norm of credible communication.

Small Voices for a Great Future

“There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow”, Victor Hugo
The definition of future in our land has always been enormous. Enormous in the sense of doing something big. Creating a future for a nation. A nation very abstractly defined. We have always remained a people who think big. Thinking big is good, but only if it serves higher interests and also remains beneficial to larger sections of humanity. Here thinking big never had this aim. This is the top to bottom, vertical thinking process that we persistently follow. We always wanted to build a Pakistani nation, the future of our dearly won freedom. This is a great thought. But how did we decide to realize it? We decided to follow dreams of rich and mindless who grafted ideas in isolation. Our education system, so vertically designed, indoctrinated generation after generation that we no more know how to think to get a future for a nation.
Lets think for a moment what a nation really means? It is made of individuals who could be best understood in their small interactive contexts. Contexts we know as communities. Now defining a community is another issue. If we try to get a perfect definition for every human denomination, we shall reach nowhere. Thus the famous saying: "definitions are abstractions and are never comprehensive." The easiest way to define a community is an interactive human entity that shares the joys and sorrows of everyday life in a very direct manner. There is nothing imaginary about knowing each other. If one doesn't have access to water the other doesn't have it either. Availability or non-availability of basic amenities (or luxuries) is a shared issue for a given community. Right now we are not talking about luxuries. We can't afford the luxury of thinking about a community sharing luxuries where basic amenities of life become luxuries.
What could be the definition of a future if we look at the world from the bottom upwards. It would simply be a sum total of most (preferably all) communities getting a better future. It is simple, the greatest good for the greatest number of people. How can we achieve it? Through allowing the greatest number of people get their voice to the greatest number of people. To give a platform to all and sundry (the not too positive term) say whatever the world is in their eyes. To respect this world view. To overcome the prejudice of prejudgement. To allow unsophisticated voices come to the fore. To let people evaluate their immediate environment and respect it with open hearts.
True, this is the death of the mainstream, but what is mainstream. If mainstream doesn't accept the parts that create the whole, it becomes an abstraction. And this is what is happening right now. Even when we send cub reporters to their own small villages, the very villages they left in the morning to come to the university, they get into their parent communities, their mothers and fathers, with a mainstream bias. The psychology of status at work. The "I am better than these simpletons, because I am going to give them a voice." And it is at this point that our community project fails. Our young men and women fail to recognize their own kith and kin.
Overcoming this natural bias is the art of community journalism. This is a typical outcome of backwardness, of predominant illiteracy, of education becoming a privilege. True, the few getting the chance to higher education are privileged, but this also posts a responsibility on the shoulders of the privileged. They are also ambassadors of the underdog. If they fail to recognize their responsibility and act as celebrities in the very courtyards they breathe in day and night, they are doomed. Their communities don't have a future. And if communities don't have a future, there is no nation to think about. We do need dreams to create our future, but we also need to know how to dream.
Community media is one such enterprise that needs technology and humanity at the same time. You can’t feel, you can’t film; you can’t make sense of the simple world around you. A world that is telling its story in thousands of different ways. One has to get rid of preconceptions to listen to the music of the heart. Getting into ones own parent community with a sense of superiority is the worst moral crime of all. It becomes even worse when the visit is meant to bring the reality about the life of a people. State of the art technology is excellent, trainings are a must, but a good heart is a precondition. Journalism for the voiceless is still a mission. It always will remain one. This is one reality never going to change until all ills of human survival on this planet are defeated. Until then we have to keep the torch burning high and bright.