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.