Posts Tagged ‘Ayaz Amir’

Media’s ‘Myopic Zeal’ and Political Bias

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

The political bias of certain journalists is well documented. Nor is this a problem unique to Pakistan Nobody questions the conservative leaning of FOX News (USA), the liberal leaning of The Guardian (UK), or the establishment credentials of The Nation (Pak). When one looks to these media groups, the perspective that will be used is already well known. But unlike most other countries, Pakistan’s media is infested with political operatives who work under the cover of journalism. While such blatant propaganda operations may exist on the fringes of the international media, they are routinely found in the heart of our own mainstream press. This raises the question of whether Pakistan’s media can truly be fair and neutral while it lacks basic ethical guidelines around political propaganda.

In America, TV anchor Keith Olbermann was suspended and ultimately fired by MSNBC News after it was revealed that he was giving large financial donations to political candidates in direct contradiction to ethics rules.

“Anyone working for NBC News who takes part in civic or other outside activities may find that these activities jeopardize his or her standing as an impartial journalist because they may create the appearance of a conflict of interest,” the NBC News policy reads. “Such activities may include participation in or contributions to political campaigns or groups that espouse controversial positions. You should report any such potential conflicts in advance to, and obtain prior approval of, the president of NBC News or his designee.”

Another prominent American TV network, CBS News, fired four employees including eminent anchor Dan Rather after it was discovered that they had run a false story attacking George W. Bush.

The action was prompted by the report of an independent panel that concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. The panel also said CBS News had compounded that failure with a “rigid and blind” defense of the 60 Minutes Wednesday report.

Asked to resign were Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervised CBS News primetime programs; 60 Minutes Wednesday Executive Producer Josh Howard; and Howard’s deputy, Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy. The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was terminated.

“We deeply regret the disservice this flawed 60 Minutes Wednesday report did to the American public, which has a right to count on CBS News for fairness and accuracy,” said CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves.

The panel said a “myopic zeal” to be the first news organization to broadcast a groundbreaking story about Mr. Bush’s National Guard service was a key factor in explaining why CBS News had produced a story that was neither fair nor accurate and did not meet the organization’s internal standards.

Obviously American media – home of FOX News – is no group of angels, and political bias exists there as well. But where in our own media can we point to high profile journalists and anchors being held to account for their political bias and inaccuracies?

The Nation is often blatantly partisan, on Sunday offering unqualified faith in PML(N).

One is certain that the Punjab government that is led by Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, will do everything under the law to arrest the culprits.

Syed Ali Raza Abidi may masquerade as a journalist, but his true profession as political operative is quite obvious to anyone who cares to look. He maintains a profile on the website www.allaboutmqm.org, and photos of him as an MQM activist are spread across the internet. Yet when publishing his writing, Express Tribune describes him only as, “A businessman who writes on politics and civic issues”. Aaj TV describes him as “A businessman and a young politician.” Abidi’s MQM activism is never mentioned in his by line, yet the writing of this ‘businessman’ follows a trend that is invariably pro-MQM and anti-government.

When MQM introduces a de-weaponization bill, Syed Abidi is there to support it in the media. This same ‘businessman’ also offers backhanded praise to the PM for ‘bailing out a failing government’ while saying that “Hopefully the MQM and PML-N have reminded you of what your priorities should have been in the first place”.

Syed Ali Raza Abidi MQM operative

Of course, Abidi is not alone and today’s examples are not the first people to use the profession of journalism as a path to Islamabad. Let us not forget that PML(N) MNA Ayaz Amir and PPP MNA Sherry Rehman were also journalists prior to their careers in politics. Nor is this to say that journalists must be devoid of personal political beliefs, nor does it mean that journalists should never change careers to politics. Actually both Ayaz Amir and Sherry Rehman were excellent journalists and also excellent MNAs. But if a journalist decides to change careers and go into politics, it should be a mystery to the public which party they will choose, so well hidden were there own political beliefs from their reporting.

Some of this problem is likely the result of the growing number of newspapers and TV channels that require more and more content to attract their audience and advertisers. Pakistan does not have enough trained and qualified journalists to fill the necessary positions. As a result, anyone who can write well and produce content for these groups is accepted. Becoming an ‘analyst’ is even easier. There one often simply needs a phone.

One part of the solution is for media groups to adopt corrective systems that ensure accuracy and accountability. Zohra Yusuf, Creative Director, Spectrum Y&R, makes an excellent suggestion in a piece for Aurora Magazine.

The answer to instilling responsibility in the media does not lie in any form of government control or oversight. The days of censorship should be firmly behind us. There are many workable and proven structures and systems of media monitoring and complaints commission available. It is the will that is needed and the consensus among media organisations not only to acknowledge the issue of accountability but to work towards setting in place corrective systems. The Express Tribune has done well to announce the appointment of Justice (Retired) Farkruddin G. Ebrahim as an ombudsman for the newspaper. In fact, it published all his contact details as well, encouraging readers to send their complaints to him. However, a solo effort by a small newspaper will have little impact unless major news organisations make a similar joint commitment.

By developing internal systems to hold journalists accountable for the accuracy of reports, media groups would ensure their own independence and freedom as well as their long-term business model. The more newspapers and channels enter the media space, being the first with ‘breaking news’ is already having diminishing returns. People see a report early, but they don’t believe it. That creates an opportunity for media groups to compete for the title of ‘most accurate’.

But ombudsmans and internal controls must also deal with certain questions of journalistic ethics such as what it means to be a reporter and what it means to be a political operative. Pakistan has no shortage of drawing room politicians. What we are desperate for are qualified journalists.

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Posted in Aaj TV, Express Tribune, The Nation | 3 Comments »

Ayaz Amir's warning

Saturday, July 17th, 2010

It’s not unusual to find journalists defending the media. Often there are articles by journalists and TV anchors lamenting the sad state of our media circus, but still defending its right to continue without correction. And one certainly does not have to look very hard to find a politician willing to chastise the media, perhaps even secretly wishing he was the ultimate judge of media content. But it’s rare to find someone who has sat on both sides of the chess table and can see this situation from both points of view. When you find this person, you should probably listen to what he has to say.

Such a person we have in Ayaz Amir, a career journalist who finds himself now in the National Assembly on the PML-N ticket. Writing for The News yesterday, Ayaz Amir makes a persuasive claim that much of today’s media attacks are essentially the work of ‘ivory tower’ intellectuals who are attacking for the sake of the attack, and not for any constructive purpose.

If the political class did not get earlier it should do so now. The target of the campaign set in motion last year was not just Asif Zardari. It was the political system as a whole, all in the name of fighting corruption, the slogan with which every road leading to hell has been paved in Pakistan since 1947.

Zardari was just a metaphor and a symbol. The wheels of intrigue, with a band of media jehadis in the lead, would not have stopped with him. They would have gone on to Nawaz Sharif, ending eventually in that dream of most retired senior mandarins, an ‘interim’ government on the Bangladesh model.

This is an interesting claim, and one that ought to be taken seriously. The blog “New Pakistan” found an older article by Shaheen Sehbai that suggests a “one down, two to go” plan.

The main responsibility of this state of affairs rests with the PPP and its leader Asif Ali Zardari, who has astounded his critics, and supporters, by adopting an almost irresponsible attitude, for reasons not yet known publicly, though there is a lot of talk and buzz that he was having some serious intra-family problems, specially with his own children in Dubai.
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Mr Musharraf has to be blamed a lot for this continuing uncertainty as he did not have the grace to admit that he was now a problem and the sooner he got out of the way, the easier it may be for the country’s political system to settle down.

He has uselessly wasted his time and energy to hang on to a broken branch, which may snap at any moment but in the process he has dragged the system down and consumed whatever positive momentum the new government had to tackle major issues.

But given his state of mind, no one should have expected him to show grace and should have been booted out earlier. According to all the signals emanating from his old constituency, there would not have been a single soul worried about his departure had it been done properly and quickly. Even now, no tears would be shed if a surgical operation gets him going out of the country, or in a safe house within.
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A greater responsibility also rests with Mian Nawaz Sharif, who has been consistent in his positions but has failed to take political decisions in line with that position to let the system move on.

He fears that if he breaks the coalition, the system will go down. This is absolutely not the case and no one in any power corridor can think, or is thinking, of disrupting this set-up and bringing in anything wild like the Bangladesh option or a replica of the 1999 Musharraf coup.

Ayaz Amir does note that it is very possible that this is all simply the result of self-righteous media representatives cynically exploiting the news to make fame for themselves without considering the consequences.

There is a self-righteous streak in our middle class, especially the non-voting middle class, which makes it adopt over-pure positions, which far from doing any good end up rolling out the red carpet for military saviours.

But even this is rather strange, if you think about it.

Politicians can be the world’s biggest scoundrels but it would be a dreary and bleak world if they were the only scoundrels around. Every profession has its rogues, every calling its blackguards. No one will accuse generals and judges, or lawyers for that matter, of being saints. No one in his right mind will describe journalists as knights of any round table. Why raise the bar to the skies when it comes to politicians?

For all their complaining about corruption, the media is not so innocent itself. The blog Let Us Build Pakistan published a report on tax defaulters from the media recently, why this did not get so much attention, I wonder? What other bodies are buried in the yards of our sacred cows on TV and in the newspapers?

Of course, this is not to suggest that corruption should not be exposed, only to question why the double standard for the political class and not the journalists? What if we got rid of all the journalists who ever wrote something that did not come true, or did not pay their taxes, or took a drink of some alcohol or flirted with some woman? Who would be left?

There are bombings nearly every day it seems, and yet The News, just for one example, is filled with stories about where someone got their degree, and what the HEC is thinking about the matter. Is this a good use of media? Or is it avoiding the real news? Ayaz Amir is a journalist and a politician also. He can see from both sides of the chess table and provide a unique perspective on the media-political situation. It would be worth our time to pay attention.

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Posted in The News | 3 Comments »

A Better Use For Reporters

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

No, not fetching tea and biscuits. Ayaz Amir penned a column in The News last week that included an interesting aside about media that I think bears your consideration, dear readers. In what is primarily a column about national security issues, Amir observes that, despite being neighbors with both Afghanistan and India, our knowledge of these nations is largely derived from outside sources:

We live in a world of our own, obsessed with self-created problems, and lashing out at windmills which, much of the time, seem wild creations of our own imagination. To real problems we are oblivious. We are not even aware, as keenly as we should be, of our own neighbourhood.

It is nothing short of criminal that our media outlets don’t have full-time correspondents based in Kabul and Delhi. Our knowledge of our two neighbours, to the west and east of us, is largely derived from outside sources — western news outlets — when it should be through our own eyes and ears.

Our better reporters — and reporting is a department in which we are not very good –would be far better occupied covering India and Afghanistan than indulging in the mindless masochism of internal bloodletting.

My Lord the Chief Justice, famous now for his suo moto initiatives, could consider taking notice of this strange proclivity.

I think perhaps Amir is onto something important here. As I have noted before, there is a real danger of media organizations fueling militarism and anti-India populism, thereby hindering the possibility of peace, because war sells better. There is another real danger, too, though, which is that international media are shrinking the size of their reporter pools, and will increasingly be looking to Pakistan’s media for reliable information on the region. If it is true that our media outlets do not have full-time correspondents based in Kabul and Delhi, how will we be able to provide accurate and reliable information? The answer is, we will not.

Instead of sending full-time correspondents to important areas in neighboring Afghanistan and India, our media has enlisted a troupe of lip sync artists who simply parrot the sloganeering of shallow and often dishonest politicians. This results in the double injury of distracting the public from the really important issues as well as leaving the news organizations without their very life’s blood – news.

Pakistan’s media should be known worldwide as the central outlet of reliable information about not only Pakistan, but the region. Instead, we are increasingly becoming known as the people who only report conspiracy theories.

Our news organizations and media should stop wasting all of their time, money, and talent on chasing the next wild conspiracy. Please leave that to the teledrama writers and directors.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »