On Wednesday the Punjab MPAs rightly pointed out that the media needed to be careful in reporting on the subject — as it should be careful in its work generally. They were absolutely right in complaining that they are often singled out for flogging by the media while some others are considered too holy for criticism.

The Dawn editorial goes on to offer some relief to journalists, saying,

“…at least in this case, the media was not the principal investigator or the initiator. It can hardly be expected to not report what it sees, just as it is duty-bound to listen to the other side and report it fairly.”

But shouldn’t the media take care not to be used as a political weapon by operatives who are peddling information with a particular goal in mind.

Meanwhile, in the Express Tribune today, Mahreen Aziz Khan roundly criticises the declining quality of TV talk shows.

With over 80 channels, the majority being so called “news” channels, the Pakistani viewers should be spoilt for choice. Except they are not. Far from it. Most of the “news” channels are miserably short on original content and high on opinion masquerading as reporting, bias dressed as analysis, and rabble rousing substituting for impassioned debate. The multiple political talk shows resemble clones of each other, with standardised sets and unoriginal formats for nightly shouting matches between the political egos that appear as guests. There are of course a couple of notable exceptions where solid research and in depth analysis are presented in an informative and intelligent manner. But, by and large, what is offered is an ungainly assortment of “anchors” browbeating their guests, who themselves are regulars, often appearing simultaneously on multiple channels thanks to pre-recording. The end game is to encourage, cajole or instigate by any means necessary, a cat fight amongst the handful of politicians offered up for the evening. With the majority of anchors gunning for the government of the day, the result is a shouting match — the television equivalent of a neighbourhood backyard argument laced with scurrilous allegations, name calling and low blows.

But Mahreen is not here to bury the media, but to save it. She points out quite eloquently that TV talk shows, by attempting to appeal to the ‘lowest common denominator’ of viewer are driving people away and reducing the quality of their programmes. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Okay it’s not all bad — yes the news/current affairs media has played a constructive role on some issues, most notably in the change in public opinion towards those who commit acts of terrorism on our soil. The self-imposed code of conduct has worked fairly well and stemmed the horrible trend of showing carnage and panic in the aftermath of tragedy, of sensationalising terror acts by adrenaline fuelled breaking news. But the electronic media is crucial for shaping public opinion on key issues, especially in a largely illiterate society and has a much greater duty. Yet the vast majority of these shows are compromising content quality to suit the lowest common denominator rather than raising standards and providing viewers with informed discussions.

I shall resist making appeals to sense of duty, since that has a poor track record for results. So let me exhort self-interest instead. Most news channels are losing ground and revenue due to the downward trend of viewership, so they should take action to avoid losses. Anchors are turning people away from the news/current affairs genre and losing audiences to entertainment — just witness the increase in TV drama productions and ratings in the past year. And, most of all, politicians are damaging their own (little remaining) credibility by taking part in these verbal brawls, so they need to take a stand by opting to not to appear on shows which openly disrespect and lower the tone of our political discourse. The viewers are already voting with their remote controls. They have had enough of this mindless media-ocrity.

Sadly, as long as the CEOs of giant media corporations continue to give more importance to the billions in advertising income that line their pockets rather than to the betterment of the nation and the people, it will be hard to convince some of them to do the right thing.

Perhaps these ‘media moguls’ will recognize the warning signs and take the advice offered to create quality programming that attracts viewers and helps better the country also.

Today, Dawn adds their voice to the debate in the following editorial:

If the person on the line is indeed Mr Mir, an explanation is in order about his possible ties with militant organisations. He must also answer allegations that the information he ostensibly provided may have contributed to the killing of Khalid Khawaja, a former ISI official belonging to the air force who had been abducted by the Taliban. Mr Khawaja, believed by many to be a Taliban sympathiser, is repeatedly described as a CIA agent by the man who sounds uncannily like Hamid Mir.

Mr Khawaja and his wife are also held responsible in part for the bloodbath at Islamabad’s Lal Masjid. The person on the phone also spews venom of the vilest kind on the Ahmadi community. Slain Taliban leaders are referred to as martyrs.

Mr Mir denies most of the conversation and has served legal notice on the paper that broke the story. He claims that he and the organisation that employs him are being victimised for their consistent criticism of the PPP government and President Zardari in particular. Hamid Mir, who is not short of detractors even within the media, also maintains that the audio ‘recording’ is the work of the Intelligence Bureau which took a voice sample and then produced an entire conversation with the help of a “special gadget.”

Mr Mir has every right to proclaim his innocence but that alone will not suffice. In this digital age it is child’s play for independent experts to confirm whether or not the voice on the tape is Mr Mir’s. It is just as simple to distinguish a doctored recording from an unedited conversation. The credibility of the media is at stake here. What is needed is an investigation that is carried out with an open mind and whose outcome is accepted and acted upon by all parties. This is imperative if allegations of unethical conduct by the media and charges of dirty tricks by the government are to be laid to rest.

Hamid Mir has responded to the original story by sending legal notices claiming defamation and demanding a written apology and Rs 250 Million.

GEO News Islamabad Executive Editor Hamid Mir has sent legal notices to the publisher, editor and staff reporter of Daily Times, as well as the chief executive of TV channel Business Plus for publishing and telecasting “defamatory material against him”.

Mir claimed that the story carried and telecast by the newspaper and the channel, respectively, was “based on malafide intentions and had lowered him in the estimation of general public as the enemy of the state”.

Mir has demanded a written apology within 14 days and its publication in the newspaper and has asked the respondents to pay damages worth Rs 250 million in compensation, else legal action would be taken.

But Hamid Mir is not the only person sending legal notices, it seems. Reports today indicate that Khalid Khwaja’s son Osama Khalid has told reporters at Dawn that his family will be registering a case against Hamid Mir for being instrumental in his father’s murder.

On Wednesday, the family of Khalid Khwaja, the ISI official who was kidnapped by a militant group in the Tribal Areas in late March and subsequently killed, declared their intentions of getting a case registered against the television anchor, Hamid Mir.

“We will be first going to the police and also to the Supreme Court in a few days’ time to get a case registered against Mir for being instrumental in the murder of my father by Punjabi Taliban,” Osama Khalid, son of Khalid Khwaja, told Dawn by telephone on Wednesday.

Certainly all people have opinions about important issues, and journalists – by the nature of their work – talk to people involved in all sorts of political activity both good and bad. But Pakistan has a set of groups within the journalist community that have either intentionally or unwittingly been part of political activity.

Ayesha Siddiqa made this point a few days ago, and today Nadeem Paracha continues the examination of the problem on Dawn Blog in a must-read post:

The emergence of a taped conversation, allegedly between famous TV anchor and journalist, Hamid Mir, and a member of what is called the ‘Punjabi Taliban,’ has created great furor – especially within the journalistic community in Pakistan.

In the the conversation, a man recognised by some as Mir, makes derogatory remarks against the Ahmadiyya sect and insistently alludes that Khalid Khawaja – the controversial former ISI man who was kidnapped and murdered by an group that is believed to have ties to the Punjabi Taliban – was a CIA agent and close to the Ahmadiyya sect.

He blames Khawaja for the death of Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) cleric, Ghazi Rashid, who was killed in the military action against armed men holed up in the volatile mosque in 2007. He tells the Punjabi Taliban that it was on Khawaja’s insistence that Ghazi continued to fight from within the besieged mosque, but was then abandoned by him.

Khawaja, who was supposedly in the custody of the Punjabi Taliban at the time of the conversation, was later found murdered by his captors who accused him of being a CIA agent and responsible for Ghazi’s death. These are the two main points that the conversing journalist makes while talking to the Punjabi Taliban member in the leaked tape.

Leading members of the liberal intelligentsia have frequently been raising concern and alarms against certain prominent figures in the local print and electronic media, blaming them of overtly sympathising and at times glorifying the violent antics of assorted sectarian and Islamist organisations.

People like Hamid Mir, Dr. Shahid Masood, Aamir Liaqat and Ansar Abbasi (all belonging to a large media group in Pakistan), have come under intense scrutiny by their detractors for not only ‘angling’ their stories and rhetoric in favour of extremist organisations, but also constantly undermining the current democratic set-up in Islamabad.

Ironically though, whereas the liberal sections of the media have not gone beyond labeling these men as Taliban sympathisers, it is their opponents within the large net of pro-Taliban actors in the media and the intelligence agencies who are said to be behind leakages such as the taped conversation mentioned above.

According to well-known columnist and author, Ayesha Siddiqa, “the conversation should not surprise people as Hamid Mir has old links with the Islamists and the intelligence agencies.” In an article she adds that there is not a single journalist, especially on the electronic media, who comments on national security and is not fed by the military or one of its many intelligence agencies.

Author of the acclaimed book, Military Inc., Siddiqa says that at present there are three opposing groups within the military and its agencies. One is pro-West, one is pro-Taliban, and the third is pro-China. All three are always at loggerheads. This also means that while each one of these groups has journalists planted in newspapers and TV channels, they use their plants to cancel out the reputation and influence of those belonging to the opposing groups.

But there is nothing new about this. The agencies have always had personnel on their payrolls operating as reporters, anchors, and ‘analysts’ ever since the Ayub Khan dictatorship in the 1960s. Respected journalist and author, late Zamir Niazi, in his book, The Web of Censorship, suggests that the agencies recruited a number of ‘journalists’ during the Ayub dictatorship, specifically to check leftist sentiments that were all the rage among journalists at the time.

Then during the Z.A. Bhutto regime, Niazi hints that the populist government and the conservative ‘establishment’ fought a battle of ideas through paid journalists. But the phenomenon of agency-backed journalists upholding the military establishment’s agenda and ideology in the press  really came to the fore during the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s.

As left-leaning journalists were forced to exit newspapers during the Zia dictatorship, the corridors of these newspaper offices were suddenly stormed by large groups of pro-establishment personnel, mainly consisting of anti-Bhutto journalists and pro-Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) men.

With the role of the ISI and other intelligence agencies expanding due to Pakistan’s direct involvement in the so-called ‘anti-Soviet Afghan jihad,’ many of these journalists were brought under the wings of various agencies, triggering a trend that still disfigures prominent sections of mainstream Pakistani media. What’s more, between early and late 1980s, the agencies were also able to plant men in the administration and finance departments of various mainstream media groups.

I got first-hand experience of this in 1993 when I joined a newspaper of a large media group; my appointment letter was constantly delayed, in spite of the editor asking the head of finance to release it. The head then bypassed the editor and went straight to the publisher, claiming that I should not be hired because I was a ‘communist’ who’d had links with the KGB (as a student) in the 1980s! As it turned out, this man was an active member of the JI, and also said to be close to a pro-jihad agency.

Crowded at the top

By the 1990s, most media groups had become a startling reflection of the tense sectarian, ethnic and ideologically fractured society that Zia’s disastrous regime and policies had left behind.

The media group I was a part of (for 10 years), was teeming with various lobbies, fighting out a cold war against one another. There were the usual high-profile agency-backed journalists who (as Siddiqa rightly suggests) were/are the ones who always manage to get the best scoops; then there was a large pro-JI lobby (whose mission, it seemed, revolved entirely around getting those they deemed to be ‘leftist’ or ‘liberal’ chucked out from the organisation); there was also a pro-MQM lobby who made sure that MQM received as much positive press as possible; and a ‘liberal’ lobby made up of assorted progressives. But more worryingly, the 1990s also saw the entry of ‘journalists’ planted or having sympathies with radical Sunni sectarian organisations such as the Sipah Sahaba.

As the agencies again became active, this time to sideline any democratically elected government that they saw as a danger to their on-going post-Zia maneuvers in the field of jihad (in Pakistan, Kashmir, and Afghanistan), a number of fresh recruits were instilled in newspapers, so much so, that opposing agencies (all with right-wing Islamist agendas, but differing on sectarian and policy grounds), now began drafting ‘journalists’ to put forward their particular version of pro-jihad ideology and interests. The result was infighting in the country’s intelligence gathering and security apparatus as one agency tried to undermine the other in their quest for more funds and political influence.

An attack in 1992 on a prominent journalist (famous for scoring a number of scoops and presently a famous TV anchor) was a stark reflection of this. The journalist, whom many believed was being fed stories by an agency, was claimed to have been attacked by the supporters of an opposing agency.

Such was the talk at the time, heralding the laying down of a whole new ball game in the intrigue-filled world of mainstream journalism in Pakistan. And this new ball game really got going when (during the Musharraf dictatorship) private TV channels were allowed to mushroom. This is the phenomenon that many within the media blame for triggering the on-going ‘anti-democracy’ and ‘pro-Taliban’ narrative one comes across on almost all major TV news channels. Opposing agency men were said to have come together during the Musharraf dictatorship to counter (through their ‘media contacts’) agency people who were supporting Musharraf’s (albeit half-baked) operation against extremist organisations.

Some political commentators point at the electronic media’s role during the Lal Masjid operation and the Lawyers’ Movement as examples in this respect. They believe whereas some TV anchors and reporters blindly lapped up ‘exaggerated figures’ and scenarios that they were fed to them by agency men opposing the pro-Musharraf organs, the game got even bigger when the same anti-Musharraf agencies ‘facilitated’ some political parties to invest heavily in the Lawyers’ Movement.

Though almost all mainstream parties took part in the landmark movement, however, the PPP and some small leftist parties blamed the PMLN and JI of mutating the movement’s orientation towards the rightist sides of the ideological divide, especially when pictures of activists carrying pro-Taliban and pro-Osama placards at the lawyers’ rallies started appearing in (mainly English) newspapers.

Observers believe that if the journalists belonging to the so-called pro-Musharraf factions of the agencies felt themselves being bogged down by those with alleged links to the more pro-jihad factions, the pro-Musharraf strains in the agencies put men like Zaid Hamid on TV – a manufactured pro-Musharraf demagogue originally placed to distract the people from events such as the Lawyers Movement.

Whose line is it, anyway?

Whereas today when the agencies (with the pragmatic support of bosses of some large media outlets) have successfully sidelined whatever there is left of any liberal, secular or leftist thought in the mainstream electronic media, it seems the channels are now overflowing with right-wing media men, many with clear links in the agencies.

But it’s not been a unanimous takeover. Simply because of the mentioned infighting between various groups within the agencies. For example, on surface, it should sound strange and contradictory if one right-wing media personality attacks another, as was the case when Zaid Hamid publicly accused Hamid Mir of being a CIA agent.

But this can easily be explained if one dwells deeper into the increasingly overlapping and complex maneuvers of the agencies. As a fellow columnist recently noted, in a matter of merely a month, two leading media personalities have been exposed in the most dramatic manner. He claimed that Zaid Hamid had dubious relations with a particular faction of the agencies, but was brought down when another faction decided to strike by bringing into play Zaid’s controversial past with a cult-like Islamic group which some puritanical Islamic organisations consider was blasphemous in its beliefs.

Another fellow journalist thinks that the ‘Mir tapes’ were leaked by a different faction of the ISI or IB. A faction perhaps opposed to the faction that Mir is alleged to have had links with.

The most interesting thing is that whereas attempts by the liberal media personnel to castigate right-wing and contentious TV personalities have not gone beyond protest columns and editorials, it has been such personalities’ fellow rightist journeymen who have been out to orchestrate their downfall.

Zaid Hamid called Hamid Mir a CIA agent, but it was Zaid who got his animated TV slots canceled when a sectarian Sunni organisation threatened to attack the channels that so enthusiastically ran the hate-monger’s much watched shows. On the other hand, Mir laughed off Zaid’s accusations but not before (unwittingly or otherwise) providing a platform on his own show for some politicians to make a meal out of another rightist TV anchor, Shahid Masood, only to supposedly have his own conversation with the Punjabi Taliban ‘leaked.’

Much more is being ‘leaked’ (more frequently than ever) to various websites. Recently, a website also put up a list of the outstanding dues that major media groups still owe in taxes to the government. Also under scrutiny are the ideological orientations and ‘links’ of journalists such as Ansar Abbasi, Shaheen Sehbai, and Amer Mateen.

Hamid Mir has denounced the taped conversation as fake. So has the media group he works for. But surprisingly, instead of investigating the level of involvement some journalists clearly have with extremist groups and intelligence agencies, all the organs of the said media organisation have gone into overdrive in attacking some of their contemporary media outlets, the government, and ‘liberal journalists’ of instigating a ‘conspiracy against free media.’

It is true that many of this media group’s ‘attackers’ have no respect for a free media. But by suggesting that the free-for-all mudslinging and dangerous angling that some of its anchors openly exhibit is akin to the group’s love of democracy and freedom of the media is really a self-defeating delusion, if not a big black joke.

Last week I visited one of Karachi’s sprawling (and impoverished) areas. I went there at the invitation of an old college friend who still lives there. Both of us were members of a progressive student organisation in college in the late 1980s.

I took this opportunity to talk to some folks of the locality. Almost all of them were from working class backgrounds. They whined and complained about the usual stuff: price hikes, lack of jobs, unemployment, crime, terrorism. But out of about ten men whom I managed to speak to, none had anything to say about either President Asif Ali Zaradri, or (thus) what the media claims to be Pakistan’s gravest issue: ‘corruption.’

No doubt Mr Zaradri is a controversial figure, but then, which prominent politician or for that matter, general wasn’t or isn’t? His misfortune lies in the way he was targeted by the media when he first arrived in parliament as a minister in his wife’s first government (1988-90).

An entire generation of military men and politicians had greedily harvested unprecedented rewards during the Zia dictatorship. It was a time when the US and Saudi Arabia were lavishly dishing out dollars as direct and indirect aid to keep Zia’s military regime (and cronies) afloat. This had an impact on the overall psyche of society as well. Exhibitionistic Islamic ritualism and lingo conveniently co-existed with overpowering greed and a get-rich-quick attitude.

This is the kind of Pakistan that Benazir’s first government inherited. Being an astute pragmatist, she understood well the kind of cynicism and materialism that had begun to dot Pakistani politics. There is now no secret about the fact that a humongous amount of rupees was being showered by the remnants of the Zia era (in the intelligence agencies) against her government.

For example, in 1989, industrial tycoons (in league with some leading media bosses and opposition politicians), who still hadn’t forgiven her father for his (albeit disastrous) ‘socialist economic policies’ in the 1970s, began running a paid campaign against the ‘corruption’ of her government and especially that of her husband. For weeks the country’s mainstream newspapers were dotted with glossy quarter-page ads against the ‘misdeeds’ of the first couple. Then, at the behest of certain intelligence agencies, the opposition parties moved a no-confidence motion against the prime minister.

Tons of money exchanged hands in the process, as the opposition tried to buy out the ruling members of parliament and the government retaliated by putting in money and resources to keep them on its side. Money spoke. In fact it screamed. Its exuberant and clandestine flaunting became the only valid option for politicians to take part and survive in politics. For this every prominent politician is guilty; just like the military men, the bureaucrats and the civilian faces of the Zia dictatorship who first introduced this trend to the game.

Thus, though it won’t be an overstatement to suggest that almost every prominent politician, military man and industrialist (ever since the 1980s) has, in one way or the other, been involved in what we generally perceive to be corruption, it is Asif Ali Zardari who has been bestowed the honour of becoming the punching bag of the nation in this respect. It was media that created this, and it is media (especially electronic) that has taken up the glorious task of turning Zardari into a punching bag once again.

But if volumes can be written on the corruption of our politicians, then one can easily scribble a vibrant comic book highlighting the shadowy and questionable ways of some of the media bosses and their talk show anchorpersons whom we see every day contemplating the date of Zardari’s fall.

At times such talk shows start sounding like televised sessions of a dedicated whiners’ club, foaming and dining on the latest slice of conspiratorial pizza coming out from the rumour oven in Islamabad. I won’t be surprised if one of these people begin to ramble about the presence of flying saucers over the President House, operated by evil aliens disguised as Swiss bankers!

But, alas. Against all odds and rumours, Zardari has actually got his name highlighted on the more luminous sides of the country’s political history, thanks to his role in the passage of the 18th Amendment and in the running of an unprecedented coalition government (of former adversaries).Something no government ever since Z A Bhutto’s demise could do (or perhaps even imagine doing) has been done by a regime whose main architect is a man most detested by the media.

But then what to say of an electronic media some of whose channels, for example, decided to place the cosmetic Shoaib-Sania saga at the top of their main 9:00pm news bulletins on the day the 18th Amendment was passed by the National Assembly and a terrible suicide bomb attack that ripped across a crowded area in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

So much for ‘concerned’ journalism.

Let’s be honest. People watch people. We love it. It’s a part of our natural need and systemic.  Some of us get bored and start watching birds or writing columns. The rest of us keep at it – people watching is the modern endemic of man. Its voyeurism’s coup de grace.Thus the TV.

Television is the Henry Kissinger of media. It has survived half a century of questionable policy making with true grit. It’s been criticized and protested against. It has been used and abused by governments, and it has used and abused governments right back. It’s been malevolently targeted and violently attacked. It’s made some terrible errors and affected the lives of millions of people. It has survived slurs like ‘boob-tube’ and ‘idiot-box’ only to come back harder, like Tony Soprano after an anxiety attack, to stake its claim. Out of the Quartet of the Essentials of the Modern Living (the refrigerator, the microwave oven and the W/C being the other three), the TV is probably the most utilized in terms of hours of interaction with human-beings, unless you live in your kitchen or worse, your bathroom.

Now flatter, leaner and meaner, with more functions and less buttons, TV still dominates our lives and (depending on its placement and content), ends up being responsible for how much we love our families, our culture and our country. In effect, TV has become the chosen representative of the human race. If we were Greco-Romans, we would call it Telly: The God of Everyday Life.

And if Telly is our daily deity, then it’s high priest has to be The Anchor.

Ah, The Anchor! Bringer of all news, good and bad. Now in Technicolor with all sorts of variations: VJs for the young and restless. Cooking-Show hosts for the consumed homemakers. Red-Carpet Hosts for the desperate housewives. Car-show hosts for the testosterone-prone boys with toys. Televangelist aalims for the over-zealous seekers of truth. Cross-dressing divas for the moderately enlightened. Political talk-show hosts for the drawing room aristocrats. And News Anchors for the teeming millions.

This space is dedicated to the unsung hero of Pakistani TV: The Anonymous News Anchor. You’ve seen him or her before: Bad suits on regular days. Scary shaloos on Eid. The Pak flag on the lapel on 14^th August. The dupattas in Ramadan. The atrocious make-up on and off Halloween. The Karachi-heavy accent. The really difficult Urdu words. The never breaking eye-contact. The exaggerated head movements. The dekhte raihiye rendition of ‘we’ll be right back’. And the complete lack of credibility.

I know I sound rather pessimistic. I am (more on that in just a bit). So why did I call News Anchors heroes, and that too of the unsung, pathos-attracting, nice-guys-finish-last kind?

Because News Anchors are nice guys who are finishing last in the brand race in Pakistan. No, I don’t mean that news bulletins are not getting sponsored (they are). I mean that news channels (and hybrid channels which feature bulletins) have failed to develop ‘personalities’ who bring us our news. In effect, we don’t have any Walter Cronkites and Peter Jenningss and Dan Rathers and Ted Koppels. We don’t even have any Ron Burgundys. We have the Anonymous News Anchor. And he/she is a brand waiting to be discovered.

Wait a minute, you say. We do have news heavy-weights. We have Hamid Mir, Kamran Khan, Shahid Masood, Talat Hussein. They are ‘known’ aren’t they? They are surely brands themselves?

Sure, brands they are, but News Anchors they are not. All of the above named are journalists or analysts turned talking heads. They are Talk-Show Hosts. They take a slice of what is called the ‘news day’ or the ‘news week’ and talk to other people about it (its like watching the highlights of a cricket match versus the real thing). They do not bring us our daily news at 9. They bring us politicized and debatable chunks of it. And they don’t come close to the ubiquity and air-time share of the News Anchor because they don’t do bulletins (which are the bread and butter of news channels).

Yet, news and hybrid channels fail to create Pakistani Edward R. Murrows– brands which stir aspiration – personalities which the nation wants to hear from on a daily basis.

I want to drive this home. Think about it. Most of us who are familiar with the medium can name at least one or two heavy-weights in most of the TV product-categories which demand anchors. We’ve got VJs (Anushey, Faizan Haque) who are brands. We’ve got political talk-show hosts (Hamid Mir, Shahid Masood) and social talk-show hosts (Mehtab Rashidi, Naeem Bukhari) who are brands. Even special events (Fakhr-e-Alam) and religious shows (Aamir Liaqat, Junaid Jamshed) have their stalwarts. So where are the star anchor men and women of news?

This is where the editorializing begins, so maybe this is the perfect opportunity to introduce my self. I’ve been a journalist since high-school. I’ve been a broadcast journalist for the last 3 years. I’ve managed news brand strategy and product development for the largest private news broadcaster in this country for the last two years. I’m currently handling the international desk for an upcoming English-language news channel. I’ve survived the jaws of the beast called Broadcast News, and I have the following theories about why news anchors are the most underdeveloped brand in TV today.

The ‘Strong Capital’ Theory (Or The Fact That News Anchors Are Not ‘Real’ Journalists Approach)

Everyone thinks and asks questions. Everyone who thinks and asks questions and then writes them down is a journalist. Everyone who thinks and asks questions on TV is a broadcast journalist. Think about that for a minute before you read further.

Imagine a system of government where the cities do all the work and the capital does all the playing. No, don’t think the Government of Pakistan (though you’re not far off the mark with that one). Now imagine that same situation being applied to a news channel: The News Director or Editor calls the shots editorially (as he or she should), but there the news anchor (who is essentially the news delivery vehicle for the channel) ends up just taking orders (which in this case is following the script on the teleprompter and asking the questions which are fed to him/her by the control room). The end-result of this system (which is real and dominates the way news is done on PTV, Geo News, ARY One World and Aaj, the four leading news sources) is that the News Anchor becomes a News Reader. Effectively, the News Anchor becomes a puppet. He/she lacks any sort of command and control over the content he/she is broadcasting. This leads to a lack of value addition to the news being broadcast (which, short of exclusives, is pretty much the same across all channels). That leads to a lack of personality, the most vital ingredient needed for becoming a brand. Because people watch people, a ‘connection’ with these weak personalities is not made, primarily because they are not journalists (they are not thinking and not asking their own questions). The news delivery vehicle has no teeth. It is amorphous and vague. The brand is left undeveloped. This is a structural problem inherited from PTV by the private networks.  It’s endemic across all news channels, and its critical.

Note: If you’re thinking ‘Shaista Zaid and Azhar Lodhi used to have personality’, then give yourself a pat on the back. Sure, those two stars of PTV News had personality, and tons of it. But those were the days of  PTV’s monopoly of the airwaves. There were two primary news bulletins in the country. Shaista had the 7 pm English News slot; Azhar had the 9 pm Khabarnama. News was an institution, not the free-wheeling competition of breaking news and fastest firsts which it became after the private players entered the market. And just so you know about a case in point, Azhar got fired for ‘editorializing’ (crying and chest-beating) during the live transmission of President Zia-ul-Haq’s funeral. Shaista still makes cameos for PTV, but do you notice?

The ‘Parrots Of The Subterranean’ Theory (Or The These Guys Don’t Know What They’re Talking About Approach)

We’ve discussed how there is a structural problem between the editorial high-command (the editors and directors who decide what’s going on air) and the news delivery vehicle (the news anchors themselves), and how broadcast output is weighed strictly in favor of the former. One ramification is the lack of personality, as mentioned above. The other one is even more critical: a lack of credibility.

Have you ever been to a fancy restaurant and asked the waiter how something is prepared. I always do. I went to a local French restaurant the other day and asked a waiter how the crème bru-lee was prepared. He knew how to pronounce it with the fancy French accent and everything, but he had no idea about how they glazed the top. Thus, I didn’t order it. I had my doubts about how good it would be. A restaurant where the waiters don’t know how to pitch menu items to a customer is not worth eating at.

I believe our news anchors are like that half-baked waiter. They know how to pronounce, not announce. As our news anchors become yes-men type, teleprompter-dependent news readers, they don’t develop any ‘tacit skills’ or areas of specialty that are critical for any one interested in journalism and/or branding. They do not work on their own material and thus do not have ownership of content. For them, there is no difference between Beirut or Baghdad, Bajaur or Bombay. There is no emphasis, no pressure, no interest which wheels the audience into the story. They are by-rote performers, ill-informed sources, suited-up parrots. But parrots, though entertaining, are not credible news sources.

The ‘Perceived Captive Audience’ Theory (Or The Everyone Will Pay Attention And Understand Approach)

Lets be honest. For most people, news is boring. There’s lots of numbers and names and places, and the creative work always looks like a map-test from O-level geography class. And considering that we live in a society where there are more bombs, guns, planes and tanks than ever before, where stock markets are always crashing, where some country or the other is in a recession, where some epidemic is always on the rise, news is usually, well, depressing. Still, we persevere and watch. We want to know. And we expect that the people bringing us the news will do it in a way which we can absorb and understand fully.

That’s a great expectation.

TV news production and copy is an inherently and fundamentally different type of ball-game than newspapers. In newspapers, you have time to produce your product. In TV, you don’t. In newspapers, a reporter has more room to work on his or her story, just as a reader could potentially have all the time he/she needs to read it. In TV, viewer attention for a story is clocked by the seconds. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, TV news copy is written for the ‘listening’ (versus for the ‘reading’ in papers, of course). To reiterate, writing for TV news is a different kind of ball-game.

Consider. Some time ago, a young reporter (trained in the traditions of a large, private and PTV-influenced news channel) approached me for help in a script for the Clifton oil-spill story. He kept on pushing the amount of the oil spill in x-thousand tons. I told him that people will not get the relevancy of the story if he keeps speaking in tons. No one gets tons. No one has any idea how much a ton of oil is, much less thousands of tons. So I told him to calculate x-thousand tons to y-thousand litres (people buy petrol by the litre). Then I told him to contextualize the amount further by saying something like ‘the oil spill was y-thousand litres, which is what Karachiites consume over z-weeks’. All of sudden, the story made sense. A regular Joe could get and relate to the story. A seemingly complicated number was ‘boiled down’ and made to ‘connect’ to the audience.

Unfortunately, producers of TV news in Pakistan do not understand these differences and subtleties. Scripting and copy for TV news is primarily done by copy editors with a newspaper background, and writing for print is an old habit which dies hard. The result: news anchors end up sounding like a newspaper. Their copy is inherently complicated and convoluted, without the necessary ‘toning down’, backgrounders and contextualization needed to engage an audience which can (and does) switch to another channel any time. In effect, the news become archaic, aged, high-browed, over-complicated and highly in-accessible.

And the guinea pig in this failed experiment? Once again the news anchor, who ends up sounding like he’s auditioning for a Aligarh mushaira competition rather than being the conversational, consultative and counseling voice of reason which a news anchor should sound like.

So what’s it going to be? Why should we be worried about brand creation within television news?

Lets look at how ‘news worthy’ the Pakistani market is: Journalism is proliferating. There are several newspapers in the country. News channels are starting up in force. The government’s politicking continues to keep us in the eye of the storm of global security concerns (the ‘best’ type of news from a purely ratings driven perspective). We are a ‘front-line state’ in the so-called War on Terror. We are at the doorstep of a national election, perhaps one of the most important ones in our history. We are at a crucial cross-roads of negotiating the Kashmir issue. We have at least two insurgencies in our western provinces. We are empowering our women. We are dressing up our middle class. We have the best batsman in the world. We test nuke-capable rockets once a month. It’s safe to say that Pakistan is highly, if not terribly, ‘news worthy’.

But these facts need to be closely re-examined in the light of how we will be disseminating such information. We are a young-nation (two-thirds of the nation is under 25 years of age), but our public education system’s plight means less people will be reading newspapers and more people will be watching television news in the future. So, can we create personalities on television we can connect with and accept as viable sources of information? Can we make the news on TV more user-friendly and accessible? Can we bring the burgeoning and ubiquitous younger audience into the currently abstract and unexciting loop of broadcast news?

The answer is not blowing in the wind – it’s on the air. Watch this space for further updates. And don’t touch that remote control.

News media making morning headlines

History was made in Pakistan this week when traditionally bitter rivals put aside their differences and concentrated on what they had in common, putting their personal ambition second to a greater good. Obviously, I am talking about the Shoaib-Sania wedding! What else could have possibly been worth reporting this week?

All this is a joke, of course, but it’s a joke that is meant to bring attention to a very serious issue – Are today’s journalists are doing their job and providing the in-depth reporting that the people need in order to make decisions for themselves? Or has our news media become more interested in sparkle and entertainment than hard-hitting news stories?

Today’s issue of Dawn includes an editorial that asks if the media is failing to uphold proper ethics when it concentrates so much time on a story like Shoaib-Sania marriage.

Media organisations are businesses of course but the ethos of journalism demands that ethics must not be sacrificed at the altar of the bottom line. Good taste also comes into it, though that is a more subjective issue. But consider this: in a country racked by militancy and terrorism, should a celebrity marriage dominate the news on a day when dozens are killed in suicide attacks? Should gossip about what is at best a footnote in the day’s events be deemed more important than the serious socio-political problems facing the country? News involves information, not sordid entertainment, and the line differentiating the two must be redrawn if the industry is to retain its integrity. It is not a news network’s job to titillate its audience or provide the kind of catharsis offered by film or channels dedicated to entertainment.

Dawn is not the only outlet to notice this problem. A recent post on the website NewAgeIslam.com suggests that the Pakistani news media is ‘bankrupt.’

You probably think that currently the Pakistani journalists are busy discussing and analysing the proposed amendments to the Constitution, or reporting on the first big conference of the landless farmers of Pakistan in which the intellectuals and experts expressed their opinions on the plight of farmers and their apprehensions and suggested solutions. Right? Wrong!

For Pakistani media, these affairs are less important than the Shoaib-Sania wedding. Like the Indian media, its Pakistani counterpart, particularly the Urdu and Punjabi media also considers the debates raging on the wedding more important than any other issue.

It seems that the Pakistani electronic media does not have any other topic since the day the Shoaib-Sania marriage was announced. A renowned Urdu journalist of India who regularly writes for Pakistani newspapers, recently sent a detailed report of the 9-hour long grilling of the chief minister of Gujarat by the SIT but to his surprise, he got a message which said,: “What have you sent? Please send something about the controversy involving Shoaib Malik and Sania Mirza. That is the most interesting news here.” It shows that the Pakistani media has no interest in the fact that for the first time in the history of democratic countries, after the Gujarat riots of 2002 the struggles of an NGO and a wronged widow bore fruit and the chief minister of a state had to be present before an investigative team appointed by the Supreme Court and face questioning for nine long hours.

To the Pakistanis, the news was not ‘interesting’. I also got a phone call from a Pakistani TV channel asking if we had a correspondent in Hyderabad and if so, his phone number should be provided to them. On telling them that we did not have a special correspondent in Hyderabad, he asked for the telephone numbers of the Urdu dailies published from there. We helped them with whatever numbers we had but at the same time, out of curiosity, we asked them why they needed the numbers? Was it because they wanted to know about the communal riots which had engulfed the city where the last Friday prayers were offered under police protection.?

The reply was, “No, sir, forget that. Shoaib Malik has arrived at Sania Mirza’s house in Hyderabad and we want to show a live telecast of the developments there?” I thought that the Pakistani media had become so bankrupt. We agree that the wedding of Sania Mirza and Shoaib Malik is news of public interest because both are star players of their respective countries and sports-lovers are familiar with their names.

But is this marriage more important than the amendments to the Pakistani Constitution under which the entire President’s powers are going to be transferred to the Prime Minister? Is this marriage more important than the problems of the poor landless farmers of Pakistan? Are the wedding celebrations of Sania Mirza and Shoaib Malik more important than the massacre of thousands of men and the rape of dozens of women?

It seems that the journalists have forgotten their professional and moral duties altogether. Wisdom has surrendered before moolah. The state of the Indian media is no different. Though people do not want to watch and read only news but want all kind of spicy stuff but that does not mean that the journalists should forget that their first duty is to keep the readers and the viewers abreast of the life and the happenings scattered around them. But regretfully all this has become a thing of the past.

There is very much a place for something sweet and spicy, just as there is always a place for entertainment. I have long been a fan of cinema, and will continue to be such. But that doesn’t mean that I want to replace news reporting with dancers and playback singers. Just because I enjoy a jilebi now and again, I will not stop eating rice and only eat jilebis. If I were to do this, my body would not get the nutrients it needs to survive.

Similarly, when our ‘news’ media becomes fixated on sweet and spicy snacks, it sometimes forgets that our brains need some facts and information about the world and society around us so that our minds stay healthy and able to properly analyze information and make proper decisions.

Journalists have a responsibility to truthfully and neutrally report the facts to the people, and news media organizations have a responsibility to support and encourage journalists in their mission. A jilebi now and then is a pleasant treat, but we must make sure that our priorities in order and that we are providing the mental nutrition we need to survive.

The article, by reporters Salman Masood and Carlotta Gall, discusses how it is that there can be two very different perceptions of Aafia in the US – where she is seen as a militant threat – and at home – where she is largely seen as a victim of oppression. As is well known, Aafia has become something of a martyr in local discussions, with the ruling political party (PPP) providing millions of dollars in legal assistance and the government raising the issue of her release with American officials and diplomats.

The broad outpouring has forced the government, led by the Pakistan Peoples Party, to publicly assure Ms. Siddiqui’s supporters that it will continue its legal assistance, which has amounted to $2 million already.

Pakistan’s government has also raised her case with American officials, most recently in February during a visit by Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy to the region.

“The prime minister has suggested to visiting American delegations that releasing Aafia Siddiqui unconditionally would greatly improve the image of the Americans in the public’s eyes,” a close aide to Mr. Gilani said.

But the Americans obviously have a very different perspective. After all, Aafia was recently convicted by a New York court of trying to kill American military officers in Afghanistan. How can there be so big a difference in opinion? Well, some say that the way media has treated the case in Pakistan has done more to create an icon than to report facts.

All of this has taken place with little national soul-searching about the contradictory and frequently damning circumstances surrounding Ms. Siddiqui, who is suspected of having had links to Al Qaeda and the banned jihadi group Jaish-e-Muhammad.

Instead, the Pakistani news media have broadly portrayed her trial as a “farce” and an example of the injustices meted out to Muslims by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. She was convicted on Feb. 3 on seven counts, including attempted murder of American officials.

“People here have very little knowledge of who she is and what she did other than she is a Pakistani woman, so the reaction is much more knee-jerk Pakistani nationalism,” said Samina Ahmed, a director in Pakistan with the International Crisis Group, a policy advocacy organization.

This ‘iconization’ of Aafia is not lost on all Pakistanis, however. Raafia Zakaria, a columnist for Dawn, explains why it has been so easy for this representation of Aafia as oppressed victim of American conspiracy to take hold in the media.

There is no doubt that the case of an ultraconservative, educated middle-class Pakistani woman who shunned the ways of the West and defied America has resonated with the Pakistani public.

“The iconization of Aafia Siddiqui as an emblem of Pakistani womanhood represents the kind of female rebel acceptable in a rapidly Islamizing Pakistani society,” said Rafia Zakaria, a columnist for Dawn, the leading English daily newspaper.

“Leaving a husband for a second marriage, traveling alone, even putting your children in harm’s way, all acts that would be otherwise reviled, became acceptable when they are done with the ultimate aim of defying the United States,” she said.

It is not for this blog to pass judgment on the guilt of Aafia Siddiqui. Even if I was inclined to do so, I do not have access to all of the facts, and my own opinions are heavily influenced by the way that the information that I do have has been packaged and presented to me by the TV shows I watch and the newspapers and blogs that I read.

The case of Aafia Siddiqui is complicated without any help from media opinion makers. Even government officials who have access to more facts than reporters and the public have disagreements.

Last month, the Pakistani minister of state for foreign affairs, Nawabzada Malik Amad Khan, said the evidence against Ms. Siddiqui was insubstantial, local news reports said. But senior Pakistani officials acknowledged that it was almost impossible to defend her in a court of law.

Some of this confusion in a case as complex as that of Aafia Siddiqui is unavoidable. But we, as journalists, must do our best not to add to the confusion, but to cut through the speculation and innuendo to report only the facts. I worry that too often, Pakistani journalist are avoiding reporting anything unpleasant. But our job is to give people the facts only so that they can make up their own minds and hopefully come to the right decision – not necessarily the decision that is easiest or most convenient.

The building of icons and journalism are two different things. Media owes Pakistan the truth.

Mumtaz mentions two ways that media can lose credibility. The first is when news organizations reduce the size of their staff and resort to ‘outsourcing’ the material for their reports. This can easily result in biased or propaganda pieces getting used in the place of actual reporting.

The second, which Mumtaz says is a more direct threat to Pakistan’s media is manipulated by political agents:

There is another way in which the issue of news credibility crops up, however, and that lies is in the influence and biases of the owners of news organisations, and their political links. Media and politics have become intertwined in the past decade: in terms of some media outlets, both print and broadcast, a consistent stance for or against a certain government, or political party, or leader, or even an issue, can clearly be identified. Matters are not helped by rumours that journalists have or can be bought, or not, or put in planted stories, or end up presenting as ‘objective’ news material that is little more than an official press release.

This is fairly clearly a problem already. This blog has found examples recently of major newspapers parroting political talking points without verifying the claims and printing anonymous opinion pieces as ‘news.’ While FOX News has already gained the reputation of a political propaganda machine in the USA, our own Shireen Mazari has made quite a reputation for herself at home and in the world, even being called the “Ann Coulter of Pakistan.”

Unfortunately, the two problems mentioned by Mumtaz are possibly working together for to the detriment of the nation.

The shrinking size of international media organizations makes it more likely that these agencies will look to the news reported by Pakistan’s media for stories and facts. So there is a problem if the stories are politically manipulated and the facts are not verified.

The result will be confusion in the world about what is happening in Pakistan. Eventually, people will stop trusting any information that comes out of our media as tainted by the reputations of these irresponsible media talking heads. Our media, as a result, will not be trusted in the world and people will not know what the real situation in Pakistan is. How would it be otherwise?

Pakistan’s media has many good journalists and excellent editors. These individuals have the ability to prevent this course by continuing to provide quality reports, but also by putting positive pressure on their colleagues to act responsibly and professionally, and to self-police the media and criticize their colleagues when they act outside the lines.

Together, we can make sure that the world not only gets the true story about Pakistan, but that they can believe it.

Pakistan media - journalists or political stooges?

Earlier this week a report was widely circulated in the media that some government officials were holding dual nationalities. Only there was one major problem with the story — the journalists did not investigate, and simply parroted what appear to be false accusations. This embarrassing episode raises a vital question about our media: Does our news media employ journalists or political stooges?

Tuesday morning, the headlines screamed across the papers: The News – “NA echoes with concerns over dual nationality,” DAWN – “Lawmakers oppose dual nationality for civil servants,” Daily Times – “MPs want to ban dual nationality holders from public office,” Frontier Post – “Govt urged to suspend dual nationality holder officials.” Ill-informed parliamentarians had read off a list of names of public officials who supposedly had dual nationality including Shaukat Aziz, Moin Qureshi, Hamish Khan, Hussain Haqani, Azam Swati, and Salman Farooqi. The newspapers dutifully reprinted these names without ever verifying if they were true, accusing government office holders of having questionable loyalties.

The next day, the newspapers were forced to print retractions and corrections, but by this time the damage was already done. The newspapers failure to verify the accuracy of the accusations they repeated gave readers the impression that they were true. The rumour was already started that these officials are holding foreign citizenships, even though there is no evidence to support the claim.

The scandal here is not so much that some politician would tell a lie in order to make attention for himself or to slander some opponent. Sadly, we have become rather accustomed to that. Worse, the scandal is that the newspapers – all of them – printed these statements without even attempting to verify the claims, despite the fact that they know good and well that such accusations must be verified. This is a serious failure on the part of the media to perform its most basic job.

Proper journalists investigate and verify claims, they do not simply repeat wild accusations. This situation could have been easily and properly managed if these journalists had done their job and simply requested the evidence of dual nationality from the parliamentarians making these claims. If the politicians cannot or refuse to provide evidence of their claims, is that not a key part of the story? The journalists could have easily called the respective immigration authorities in the nation where the official supposedly has dual citizenship. Surely they have telephones in their offices?

And this was not some minor claim that was being reported. These were serious accusations with serious consequences. The Constitution disqualifies for some government offices anyone who acquires the citizenship of a foreign state. One would think that, considering the seriousness of these accusations that the journalists would take a few moments to verify the claims before printing them. But, rather, each of the newspapers ran the story without question, printing the accusations as if they were not journalists but political stooges working in street level politics.

People rely on the media not to be an echo chamber of lies and half-truths used for political gamesmanship. Journalists are supposed to be more than just film stars lip-syncing to the playback of political speeches. The people rely on the media to report hard facts, not rumours and gossip. If the journalists who are writing for major newspapers are not checking their facts, it calls into question the very reliability of the media itself.

The media should do more than issue a correction on their websites. These are serious accusations that these news organizations have simply parroted. They owe their readers and the accused a proper response by investigating the claims and publishing new stories that state very clearly what the facts are in this case.

The report claims that a petitioner has asked the CEC to investigate whether Zardari was eligible to stand for office under under Article 63(2) (3) read with articles 5, 25, 50, 62 and 63 of the Constitution. The petitioner claims that, with the Supreme Court’s voiding the NRO, Zardari has become retroactively ineligible to stand for the office of President under Article 41(2) that says a candidate must be qualified to be elected as member of the National Assembly.

The Dawn report fails to note, however, that Article 41(6) of the Constitution states quite clearly that, “The validity of the election of the President shall not be called in question by or before any court or other authority.”

In fact, the only means provided in the Constitution for removing a sitting President are in Article 47: “Notwithstanding anything contained in the Constitution, the President may, in accordance with the provisions of this Article, be removed from office on the ground of physical or mental incapacity or impeached on a charge of violating the Constitution or gross misconduct.”

While it might be of some academic interest as to the retroactive eligibility of Zardari, the fact is that he was elected and Article 41(6) legitimizes that election. Moreover, at the time of the election, all the facts available now were available then, so there is no new information that would have changed the outcome of the election other than the voiding of the NRO, which was, of course, not void at the time of the election. To quote a common phrase, you cannot un-ring the bell.

Readers of Dawn’s report may be misled into believing that President Zardari’s election could be retroactively voided, causing a crisis of leadership in the government. In fact, the Constitution clearly says this is not true. In the future, Dawn should make sure that it’s reports include all the important facts so that readers are able to fully understand important situations.