Surviving the pandemic

I am getting invitations to visit places, since we have got the opportunity for holidays in the middle of the busiest time of the year. These “invitations” are the indicators of our ignorance from the global pandemic. Nobody is taking it seriously. Memes and funny videos are in abundance. Social distancing is not in sight, food streets are bustling, and the closure of public gatherings is being received with apprehension. I ask myself about the reasons for this nonchalance. There might be many. Lack of awareness is one. This lack of awareness springs out of our general lack of seriousness towards health issues. The traditional set ups, like mosques, shrines are functioning and preaching religious determinism as a counter punch to scientific truth. It is a case of tradition vs innovation, of predestination vs knowledge. They need to get out of their refuge and join hands with the world around them. Government has closed down all educational institutions till April 5th. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa there is resentment among parents and private schools. Newspaper articles are being written in leading newspapers to express this displeasure, citing medicine doctors as experts. Schools even defied the government directive and remained open on Monday. The employees are happy they have a holiday, while the employers are taking it non seriously too. This brings into play the usual mistrust in the educational system, especially higher education and private schools, where the so called administrations consider the teaching staff less loyal to the institutions. Since no one was prepared to deal with such a catastrophe, improper responses are emerging everywhere. Punjab government has to circulate another directive addressed to private universities not to ask teaching staff to come to the educational institutions. The culture of making fun of everything, a specific trait of social media, has desensitised people in Pakistan to the gravity of the situation. The reality of the situation is that the number of cases has risen from around 30 to 92 over the weekend. People mostly travelling from Gulf and Iran are being tested positive. But this is not all: passengers coming from London and the US have also tested positive in Lahore and Islamabad, respectively. But the use of authentic information is not a strength of Pakistani information seekers. We can all get relevant information through using authentic sources like WHO, or the coronavirus update on the conversation. Instead of getting all sorts of useless, unconfirmed WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram news junk we can easily sign into fact based sources. You can use your social media accounts to get access to authentic sources. One also has to get into the habit of long reads. Instead of repeating the same facts or fictions we should start reading the details. This ranges from basic facts and timeline to simple rules to follow to the manage our media consumption of COVID 19 on the way we see globalisation and the way it will be affected by it. This will fill the gap of authenticity in our information void. Misinformation is lethal when it comes to such huge catastrophes. The fact that we are refusing to adjust to a new information culture is nothing wrong. It is very natural to avoid the truth conveniently, because of the fear of changing our persona. Or maybe the real us! But we have to understand the fact that this change in unavoidable. We need to change our perspective. Even if it seems like a flu, it is not the flu. It is dangerous, because it has no cure. And having no cure is a scientific fact. There is no conspiracy. If social distancing is advised, it is the right measure. If one has the luxury to work from home, one should take it seriously. The employers should also understand the fact that it is in their best interest too. It might seem like fun at the moment. But if the pandemic stays longer, and it seems it is not going away anytime soon, it won’t be fun anymore. Work from home and being on one’s own might seem as a recipe for leisure and introversion, it is in not so in reality. We also should be weary of overstretching the power of our faiths. Faith healing or the inner value of our particular faith is not going to help. Only science can. And science is advising us to adjust to a human situation. Imagine if it were a war and all of us had to enlist for the very purpose of killing each other. Thank God, it is not! The whole world is being united to share information, to enhance transparency, and to get through the crises. We are all in it. And maybe for the first time in human history we are not pitted against each other. We are creating a global fraternity to overcome a common enemy. So, the best way to be part of the solution is to be positive, be cautious, be scientific, and be responsible. Above all, experience has shown that the more proactive a society is the better are its chances to survive the pandemic. And last but not least we need to be more generous and forgiving. Most of the people can’t afford to isolate themselves. They have to work to get their sustenance running. We should think about them. We should be more compassionate, our government more humane, and we should also rethink the distribution of resources. We should keep in mind the fact that the earth has enough resources to feed the people living on it. It is the people who divest similar human beings from their right to live. Let’s be not among those. Let’s try to be among the ones who make life easier for others. This is humanity. Let’s be human! Picture courtesy WTAP

The Reluctant Gunner

In my younger days, 1970s and 80s, it was a common sight to see men, young and old, carrying guns everywhere in Hashtnagar, literally meaning eight cities, the area that includes Charsadda and 7 other towns in the area. Guns were carried while travelling in bus or walking around, being on a bicycle or riding the newly introduced motorcycles. Even the Imam of our mosque, who used to visit only for Friday prayers from Shabqadar, used to carry a German C96 Mauser, a big pistol with a wooden holster. As kids we used to fancy the gun more than the sermon and looking at the firebrand while he used to deliver his Friday sermon; and then shaking his hands after the prayers was a rare pleasure. He was a very kind man, soft spoken, gentle, and always delighted to see the kids coming to the mosque. These were the days when guns in Pashtoon society had nothing to do with violence. Violence was there, but every person carrying a gun weren't trigger happy. True, there were family feuds and other issues that ended in violent encounters, but it was nothing compared to the state of affairs we are in at the present.
The tragedy in Charsadda has brought the brave side of Pashtoons to the fore. The professors sacrificing their lives to save their students and students and local staff defending the university are acts of bravery that have been lauded nationally as well as globally. In the mixed expression of grief and frustration we have seen outcries like "we don't need laptops, give us guns", and many similar slogans. These are very natural emotional expressions after the loss of so many lives and the emerging sense of mistrust in the state institutions to protect educational institutions, especially those of higher education. But all this fury and anger should't make us blind to the very purpose of having educational institutions, higher education in particular.
The emerging debate of carrying guns for the sake of personal security and collective good on campuses is not an easy question to answer. This has nothing to do with the Pashtoon traditions, the sacrifice of teachers and students, the bravery of these young men as well as the local staff. There is a deeper moral question involved. A question that could not be brushed aside in the sentimental remembrance of a past that looks pretty through the lens of nostalgia.  The last few decades were the years of the rise of education and that of the importance of the child in a family in this region. These were also years of the rise of nucleus family due to increasing number of working class Pashtoons. The youth got educated and started looking for jobs. A working class mind always thinks about getting a better career, looks for better schools for his/her child, and, naturally, likes to avoid anything that threatens their job security. And what could be more fatal to job security than a family feud, an old enmity, or a new one. Had there been any older scores to settle, the Pashtoon working class avoided getting into new ones.
Marx was right while saying that cultural change happened best through the change in the instruments of production. The land tillers got into 9 to 5 office routines. Sons (and also daughters) bringing cash on a given date was a great help to support the farming family. Slowly but gradually everyone wanted to have more and more of their family members into jobs, preferably government jobs. The change in the instruments of production also brought change in the family structure. Nucleus families emerged out of the ages old joint family system. The nucleus family brought one necessary change with it: the rise of the importance of the child. The little guys became the centre of attention of the parent. The bread winning father and the house-holding mother's focus of attention is now the child. And what is the most important thing for a child after a healthy meal, clothing, and health? It is education. Look at the network of private schools in every nook and corner of KP. Look at the rise of universities in every corner of the province. And not only are there universities, there is competition among young men and women to get admitted into these universities.
What does it signify? It signifies the emergence of a new paradigm. It is not simply a paradigm shift. Pashtoons have reinvented themselves in one of the darkest hours of their history. They have decided to transform the tribal tradition of gun loving folk to that of book loving, education thirsty nation. This is the new national identity of the Pashtoons. Our decision to work at universities and the youth's to get educated there is a cultural change, made through a moral decision of a people who see life differently. This is the social role this new Pashotoon society has assigned to teachers and students. In the same way we have abdicated the gun loving and carrying role in favour of the security apparatus of this country. Asking us to perform a social role we no longer own is too naive. It is not possible to go back to my childhood days and watch "Tamache Mullah (The Religious Scholar with a Pistol)" in the Friday sermon. He is no more there, nor is anyone with any semblance to him. In the words of Iqbal, "Worn out ideas could never rise to power in a people who had worn them out".
The right thing to do is to support and sustain universities and all teaching institutions perform their social role and make it possible for the institutions responsible for security to perform theirs. It is never about expediency and ad-hocism. It is about firm decisions keeping in mind the right roles each and everyone among us are destined to perform. Pashtoons are courageously going through the worst of all times. The national leadership should recognise it and make sure that this cultural progress is respected and defended. This is the basis of a true national unity. A nation failing to achieve this doesn't stand a chance in the comity of nations.      

Portraits of Grief: Helping the traumatised through story telling

Men die but dreams survive. Each of us will die with a dream, a longing for tomorrow. The same happened to the young who died in Charsadda. Every death leaves some dreams behind. But the sudden, unexpected departure of any youth leaves a lot of unfulfilled desires. In places like Charsadda it is not only the dream of a person, but that of a family, a village, a small town, a group of humans that die an untimely death. It is more the death, than the way it happened, that matters. The manner of death is a transitory story. It is important, no doubt! But life has to go beyond it, no matter what. Media is the conveyer of information about such heartbreaking happenings. It is but also the image factory that represents a people, happening, the aftermath, and the followups. The first function, naturally, is to inform a larger public about what happened. But then begins the phase of understanding the cultural context of the tragedy. Spot coverage and answering the immediate questions is important and there is no journalism without the spot coverage. But there are limits to continue with the same basics. Professionally and ethically there is need to build the capacity to switch from the news narrative to the human context. Following up on the same news spiral brings audience and media fatigue, which kills the story too early. It never helps understand the human problem a tragedy creates and leaves behind. It just keeps it a gory memory. The inability to follow tragedies from a human perspective is one great weakness Pakistani media has to learn to overcome.
How to do justice to this human function of the media? This is possible through opening the canvas of media representation beyond the spot coverage. People live and die in communities. They have lives that stretch far beyond the happening that brings their lives to an end. They live in the real human habitat, the human environment. Once the immediate fact finding and representation is over, the media has to follow up into the real life circles of the victims. Journalism has a responsibility to represent the community the victims belonged to. And this effort should not be focussed on finding clues about the happening. Not at all! The very reason for this is that communities under trauma need to be represented in the media. This is an ethical burden media should be readily able to shoulder, whenever the need arises. This need visits us too very often nowadays in KP and FATA, but the media, unfortunately, fails to respond each time. When tragedies strike a human denomination, journalistic responsibility goes beyond the narration of happenings. It stretches into the realms of integrating the community, keeping the collective psyche together, healing the wounds of the bereaved, and giving the sense of togetherness at moments of collective alienation.
How is it possible? Story telling, simple story telling! Don't let numbers make humans disappear. Always keep the human alive. In the present case, the number 21 or 22 has simply impersonalised the young souls. Weren't they young individuals with living lives, families, loved ones, loves, and places to go and likes to like? They surely were. But why to quantify them beyond recognition? I think none ever gave any serious thought to the fact that we have eliminated the very human aspect of the tragedy through a routine ritual, the counting game.
Don't universalise! Making larger than life characters out of human beings is no tribute. It doesn't help. Keep them human that ordinary mortals, their community and many other similar human beings, could identify themselves with. The misplaced idea of heroism being something abnormal, larger than life, is primitive. Death already reveals a lot about a human being. There is nothing more than the loss of a human life for a people who love the person. They need support, identity, and fellow feelings to overcome the grief. They need to see how their loved one is being portrayed. And what could be the best portrayal than the way the person lived? Just do that, if you want to help and put your bit into helping a people out of trauma. The person has family: a mother. Did they speak with their mother? What were the dreams they used to discuss? And please, don't bank upon misery. Don't use the wailing of a mother to develop a story. Get information from sources that are in a position to talk normally. Everything could wait, literally everything! A friend might be a good source to talk. A village elder might tell you about the young man who used to have a chat with him whenever he was home on the weekends. Don't go for extremes. Try to keep it normal. Keep in mind that the aim of such portraits is to help a people, not to make them a spectre of helplessness.
It is always about life, about the next day after the tragedy, about the stream of life. The human function after the tragedies is giving the survivors and relatives of the victims a closure that help them live through hard times. Another aspect is to make a larger audience understand how tragedy affects lives in general. This helps in developing a lager community, a partnership in grief. The sharing of grief is always soothing and it helps a lot. A people who know that others are also feeling their pain could overcome the trauma easily. They can easily defeat alienation, individual and collective. It is also vital to understand the difference between misery and grief. Journalists too very often think that a wailing female (mother, sister, victim) projects a tragedy best. This is untrue, and extremely unethical too! Being miserable doesn't create a bond. It simply attracts the audience for a moment and then shy them away. Nobody wants to see miseries all the time. People have their own baggages to carry too. It causes depressions, traumatises the audience. This doesn't mean that the audience is not interested. They are, more than anything else. But one has to give them something to relate to. One has to give a context to which they could relate. They are ready to understand life beyond the immediate happening. To know the life cycle of the victims, the normal selves before the last breath. Why do they take such interest in it, or why should they? Because they could identify with the stream of life. If none could identify with a happening, the marathon transmissions, and all the air and space dedicated to the coverage of a tragedy is in vain. Catching traumatised people and asking nasty questions to make them cry is not journalism at all. It is the rating race. Grief doesn't necessarily mean the weaker side of a human being. It is the total reaction of a person or a community to the loss of a person (or persons) who are important in the life cycle of the people. Portraits of grief are showing this place of a person in the community. And the portraits are nothing but a holistic image of the life of a community with the understanding that a community is the basic unit of human interaction. A journalist representing this unit properly is doing his/her job properly. If not, there is a lot to rethink!

The Academic's Burden: Offering the Thematic of Development in Everyday Journalism

Universities are based on the idea of giving fresh concepts to the societies that constitute them. Educating the students through granting degrees is one visible output. But this is not the core function. The modern market driven function of supporting the market falls too short of the very essence of having a university at all. Universities are not there to stuff the markets with whatever the market demands. It is not a supply system for a demand driven elite. Universities have a higher human function. Market might not be human. It, in fact, never is. A university exists for the very purpose of making things right and not simply "make things run". The question of what a university discipline should offer differs from discipline to discipline and from one time and space to another. Journalism, mass communication, media studies, and similar mushrooming nomenclatures are testament to the existence of a rapidly changing discipline, possibly a discipline that yet has to coin its very definition. One thing is but for sure: journalism exists because there is media! What should it do then? Serve the media, fulfill the market demand? This seems an obvious answer. But here we are confronted with another question: why does media exist? Because of the audience? Again, a simple and straightforward answer. But this makes things complicated for media education. The role of media educating institutions is not to serve the media market. It is, in fact, to serve the society that is constituted of human interactions and not institutional elitism. University education in the discipline of journalism, the business of reporting in all forms, is to make sure that this function is performed properly by the media (or whatever form of mass communication exists in a given society). Thus, the watchdog function over the very watchdog (the media). KP and FATA are one of the biggest sources of news in our modern world. The occasional rise of other centers never diminished the importance of this part of the world. The biggest problem with all this fame is just notoriety, not popularity in any positive sense. The world has known this part of the planet through the Afghan War, beginning in the late 1970s. The war never left this part of the world. 9/11, terrorism, drones, the war within Pakistan, and all that could go wrong here as well as its "consequences for the world", remains a topic of global interest. The local in Pakistan is also shaped by the global. So is the power of hegemony!

Since the world media attention became the reason for the very introduction of this part of the world in news, it, naturally, gave the global interest ascendency over the local. There were no skill sets for the local or national in this part of the globe at that time, and this remained the case for years to come. War sells best. It's true for any news media. It sold the best here too. Young or experienced, all journalists aspired to cover war and conflict. The coverage was, however, never controlled by the local journalist. The local journalists are almost always at the supply end of the news material needed by the international (sometimes the national) journalists that the local journalists cater to. This stringer function has not allowed the local media or system of journalism to develop its own shape. There is a rising sense of loss among the journalist community in KP and FATA that their contributions to the media networks around the globe is not helping their own life cycles as professionals. Unfortunately, it is adding to the notoriety perpetuated through the global media complex, highlighting a moneymaking cobweb to exploit the weak local media structure and a feeble capacity base of journalism professionals. The way out of the routine is not easy to find and the measures resorted to by individuals and institutions, remain "desperate" at their best and pathetic at their worst!

This is the point where academic responsibility comes into play – the urgency to offer something that could solve the social conundrum. We face a problem whose manifest results are known, along with the root cause, but there is no indication of the way out! The way out, the alternative, is a different skill set that could be used to work a new narrative that is positive, but newsworthy at the same time.  Offering a positive alternative in the midst of sea of negativity is not an easy task to accomplish. Market shows its real colors by resisting any effort to change the status quo. Any remote effort to make a dent in the moneymaking process is not welcome. Surely, developing a positive alternative in our case is destined to change the very status quo and affect vested interests within the global media complex. It will also affect the global image factory that runs on the very idea of keeping the bad boys bad and the good ones good.

For the media complex, it is not easy to adjust to newer positive images, after trading negativity and selling it profitably for almost four decades. The national and global political interests are also closely tied to the media hegemony and imperialism. The development of new themes thus becomes the responsibility of an institution that is not part of the media routine, but it is still too close to understand the dynamics, the needs, the problems, and the potential of the media. This is what an academic institution is about. It is not giving daily laborers for the routines, but innovative ideas and spaces that could help media perform the social service it might be failing to render.

The need of the hour seems to be giving this faceless part of the earth a face: a Human Face. We need the Human Face of KP and FATA in the media. The routine only keeps the negative one for its daily consumption, both at the national and global level. The space for development journalism is limited, if at all. It doesn't even exist for the whole of the country, let alone for a part of it that is viewed by many as wretched. Trading misery has become the trend in Pakistan. Most of our so-called development content is about oddities or miseries. Emphasis, workload, agenda, routines, and many other reasons deter the individual journalist as well as the institutions from doing anything innovative. In desperate efforts to make a difference, journalists and their respective media institutions resort to different stories. Even senior practitioners are not able to differentiate between investigative journalism and development. Many take infotainment, entertainment, and other soft themes as development. Some go the length of taking the pain of doing documentary content with a touch of misery or novelty to satisfy their urge to do a different job beyond routine. All this points to the simple need to develop an independent space where the themes are not simply developed, but also practiced. Such a space where high-quality and creative content is presented for sharing. Free of cost, no strings attached! Such a space can be offered only by a university whose primary purpose of being is the pursuit and propagation of knowledge.

JMC, UoP is ready to develop and share this space through its website for development journalism. The very local concept of development journalism has been devised according to the local needs. But these needs have been measured through a global lens, glocalised over the past five years. It is time to present the product that fit into this frame in keeping with the market needs. The development of a good concept is not difficult. Every academic could do it. It is the marketability of the concept of development that is the challenge. A product based in a definite concept of social service but complying to the needs of the market is the task. The website exactly aims at doing this. Development is an inclusive concept. Here, we have an aim. Development journalism is doing journalism with a sense of purpose. At present the underlying concept is to give the Human Face of People of this part of the globe. This is an ever-evolving paradigm. It is a process of social change with a dual function: transforming the narrative within the media as an institution on the one hand and serving the society that provides the base for both the media and the educational institutions, on the other. None could predict the time frame for change, but at the same time, no one could argue the fact that it is high time to make a sincere, full-blooded effort, here and now!

Development Journalism: defining the elephant in the dark

Development journalism is one of the many modern journalistic buzzwords. Like other similar nomenclatures, it is more fancy sounding than practically known. We all talk around it, but very seldom do we really understand. Like an elephant in the dark, everybody has his/her own definition. This ranges from experts to practitioners, novices to the enthusiasts. We all want to make the world a better place through our work in all walks of life. Journalism is no different. How to actually make the difference is the question that stares us in the face! There are as many definitions as there are conversations. We can just pick any and make a good talk. But this won’t help. We need a working definition that one could practice by employing it. When young men and women are asked to do development journalism they look at their workloads, salaries, capacities, and above all the demands of the medium/organization they are working for. And the question that strikes them most is whether their teacher/trainer/expert had ever been to the field, whether the guy has ever been through the toiling days of working up the ladder or was she/he just placed at the pinnacle. Or the person simply doesn’t mean what he is saying. This is where we fail miserably to serve development journalism as trainers. We make it a stand-alone venture. And stand-alones are never practical; they are exceptions. All the debate on development points to an extra, out of the box, heroic effort. Something big! Something unusual! Unfortunately, this is not the case. There is nothing unusual about development journalism. Development journalism is the effort to help the people, the audience, to make informed decisions by equipping them with right information. Development journalism is not advocacy; it is just putting bits of knowledge into every story to make it more helpful in understating a human situation—the human situation journalists report in their daily routine. Development journalism has a concept and one follows that concept in the daily routine to make a difference in everyday routine. The concept, as cited above, is to add to people’s knowledge about issues while covering the routine. The question that arises is how could one add to substance while doing the everyday spot reporting. If a video is 30-second long, how could one add to the substance? Time and space limitations are one of the major considerations of the media market. There is no escape from it. The other important element is expectation! What do people expect to hear or watch? And by this it is never meant sensation or otherwise. It is simple. A road accident spot news is a road accident. People are not looking for a documentary on how roads are built. They just want to know what did happen, how did it happen and with what effect. The easiest way of doing a good development story is to do objective reporting. Have a look at your story and see what information is NOT needed? Where are you repeating yourself to the limits of redundancy? The skill to do the right work lies in the basics. A journalist failing to do the basics right is destined to do bad stories. If you don’t have good language skills you are definitely going to write or talk longer, repeat sentences, and go round the same words again and again. Insecurity in expression is the worst enemy of any expression, journalism being no exception. The second most important element is breaking monotony. Read the last 10 stories you have written covering spot events of the same genre and look for something new. There won’t be any, if you are repeating the same. Think for a moment the time you and the audience are spending on this story. Is it worth repeating the same, despite the fact it is true? This is a very important question to ask. Every story should have a purpose. Information never means repetition of the same jargon. Once the monotony is detected, there is a need to break it. But here it is important that the news element is not compromised. One need to look for weaknesses in the report that could be rectified through brining in small bits of useful data or any other relevant facts that are easily available. The balance between news and novelty, between spot coverage and knowledge content is all that matters. The effort to make the story more objective rids the report of unnecessary words, expressions, images, voices. The place left open due to this clarity should be used to fill the report with useful information that adds to the audiences’ knowledge in a soft and regular manner. Useful information could be anything, ranging from common numbers to names of responsible persons to connect to. Keep in mind that the audience doesn’t have the same access to information as journalists have. It is never all for granted. People might not know when a common cold becomes life threatening. People might not know if dengue mosquito could be repelled by the common lemon grass or flowers that abound all over the place. This is a bit of information that would help people make better decisions. We should always keep the very nature of information in mind. It is not always a great revelation that people need. Something simple and useful that is not common knowledge qualifies as the best knowledge transfer. And think about all the 10 stories having this little bit of extra, each having an individual status, despite it being a routine story. A nice picture of a flower, marigold, with the details that its plant could be helpful in averting one of the scariest bites nowadays. Your story will have more aesthetics and also more credibility.

In terms of marketing and competing for space, time, and attention, rest assured that your organization will make use of the added information you have provided. If it is a video on TV, the marigold will be splashed every now and then. If it is a web story, the captioned picture will surely find a nice place on the page. And think about adding a little information each time you do a story. And keep it simple. Don’t over cook. Just add one bit at a time. Once you have done ten stories, sit back and have a look at your work. Compare the 10 routine stories without anything new with the ones that had a little bit of information. You will see the difference, a pattern of change in your presentation of facts. You will also see that to give room to something interesting, you have vetted your story and made it a better objective piece. The improvement on objectivity has given you the room to add something to your work that has directly enhanced the quality of your product. And what does your management love most: a product that is good and also doesn’t cost in terms of time, expense, or space. You just did that. It is a win-win situation. This is the most basic and correct way of doing development journalism, just adding something to the knowledge of your audience. Information that empowers people to make conscious decisions. Imagine all of us doing this as a habit. Development journalism will transform the very nature of development communication. And nobody is putting extra hours. Neither is anyone doing something out of the ordinary. It is all in the day’s work.

Peshawar Tragedy: representation in the media and fear of expanding Trauma

The life changing tragedy happening on December 16th has changed the very life perceptions of people living in this city. The show of solidarity from all segments of Pakistani society and the rest of the world is very comforting. The local and mainstream media’s response to the tragedy is laudable. People in the city of Peshawar felt to be part of the larger human habitat after a very long break. Media persons went through a personal trauma while covering the horrible event. This really showed the human side of journalists and journalism, which showed how this professional group owns the audience and how much they are part of it. At this point of our national history it is important to look at the way this incident is being presented and how it will affect the audience as well as the working journalists. The spot coverage of the event has exposed the very weakness of the media to deal with certain incidents. In an era of break neck competition and breaking news, it is difficult to manage live coverage. This has remained a long-standing ethical question, yet to be dealt with by the national media as an intuition. Asking critical questions form the victims, who were waiting to see whether their loved ones were alive or not, added to the grief of the parents and relatives on the spot. It has but also affected viewers across the globe. Then came the next day when media persons asked questions from relatives, mostly parents, in their homes or hospitals. Here again, most of the time, the limits of professionalism were extended beyond the ethical conscience of the journalists themselves. In hindsight, even the journalists covering the unfortunate incident and its aftermath will see that they pushed the interviewees too far. This brings the ethical question of making a clear policy on covering such gory incidences and capacity building of journalists on issues of trauma on a personal level as well as an understanding of the effects of their work on the audience. The second issue that is very important in media representations is “the follow up”. Follow-ups are mostly the repetition of the same day’s images and audio-visual presentations on the media. There is no question about the fact that the media and media professionals mean well and do their best to keep the audience up-to-date on the happening, and its aftermath. The audiences do need these follow ups to know about and deal with the tragedy. But the repetition of graphic presentations has a traumatizing effect on the audience, especially children. In the present case the very victims of the incident were children. This makes it even worse for the audience. Children looking at children, endlessly, seeing their misery, and identifying themselves with them, makes the whole media exposure extremely traumatizing to the worst limits. The media needs to look into this issue. It is not easy to adjust to unending tragedies and the professional requirements, professional and market pressure, and many other seen and unseen pressures on the individual journalists as well as media organizations. But at the same time, it is important to have a serious check on presenting and following up on tragic incidents. An audience-focused media is the need of the hour. It is high time to look into the needs of the audience and see to the effects of the media representations on the audience. An audience-focused media will strive to safeguard the best interests of its audience. Spreading trauma through a well-intended, but faulty, product is not a service. The line should be drawn to avoid any such impact. A debate on trauma and how to avoid its spread through the media product is immediately needed. And immediacy means right now, not any debate in the near future. We don’t have the time for such drawing room decisions.

Peshawar Tragedy: Some basic fact checking, the Media Monolith tends to ignore

The whole world is busy explaining the events from yesterday in Peshawar. We all have our own ways of expression at individual and professional levels. In fact, individual expressions beamed on the media become collective images. I see an anchor arriving from Karachi and hovering at LRH, looking for interviewees. His prime target is to find a loved one who has lost a loved one and make him/her cry in public. He couldn’t find many and had to remain content with doctors and someone whose loved one escaped death with minor physical injuries. There were others who did follow their prey to homes (these were the local guys) and had a good rating by making the viewers cry. Well, this is media. And this is what most of people in this business call a human touch. Let me tell you guys, its NOT! I think breaking a few stereotypes/misconceptions would be great for a beginning. Images that we just built last night with the help of the global media enterprise in our effort to be “global”. First, Army Public School was a school where kids, like any other school going kids, studied. It was not a military school. It was a school where kids of military men went along with other civilian kids. And again all the kids did not belong to military officers. In the services there are also lower ranks where parents have similar problems as any of the lower middle class, poor ones with little incomes. Fees were lower for the forces’ kids, while civilian kids used to pay more. But the fees were affordable enough and the education was at a par with other private schools, at times better than many. And last but not least, the parents’ preference to get their children educated at this school was not due to any misplaced notion of hobnobbing with the brass. It was just good quality education. So much for the simple fact of defining the school. Now where is it located? It is not simply about military area, which is highly secure. This is not a solely military inhabited area. Warsak road leads to Peshawar’s suburbs, a number of villages. This road also has the largest number of private schools where most of the kids of the same age as the ones died on Tuesday go for leaning. And the talk about adjacency to the tribal areas is another misconception the Pakistani mainstream creates in collusion with the global media industry. Peshawar University and Hayatabad are nearer to Khyber agency than the area where this school is located could be to Mohmand Agency. Adding spice to demography to make it sellable at the cost of basic facts is extremely unethical by any standards. And the majority of the private schools being here and parents being satisfied with their children studying there is a testament to the fact that it was not situated in the middle of the wild west of Pakistan. Checking basic demographic facts is always good. Google mapping amidst drumming is no journalism. Its not even good story telling. The next question is whether people would be feeling safe to send their kids to any school at all, or to the ones in this area, let alone Army Public School? It is the future of education in this city that is at stake. The narrative of “we are united” is not worth. The politicians gathering in Peshawar won’t be there forever. And even if they are, it will merely add to the city’s security load at a time when its security apparatus should be least bothered with VIP security. The way ahead should be the immediate topic, not the rotten word juggling with the same sordid faces who change mantles like stage performers to earn their “dishonest buck”. And last but not least, the city is in shock and this is not symbolic. The rotten narrative of Pashtoon bravery should be kept aside and the real fact of everyone feeling afraid for today and tomorrow of their children should be the discourse. Getting images from schools from Punjab and Sindh with slogan chanting kids won’t change the reality on the ground. The false hope this city has developed during the last few months is no more. The fear of uneasy calm being the harbinger of a huge storm has proven right and now we are all right in its eye. By “we” I mean people of Peshawar and KPK (FATA included). The rest can surely praise us for our bravery and we appreciate it. But we know that in reality we are all alone amidst all this. This is the sad reality we need to understand and others, to acknowledge. Pakistan has yet to grow beyond provincial boundaries of ethnic divide. Until then, every unit stands alone amid the empty rhetoric of unity.