Anyone watching the program can see that Shahid Masood’s famous ability to grill his guests has gone missing when Imran Khan appears on the set. Rather, Masood falls over himself to praise the PTI leader as gaining popularity. It is hard to watch the clip without feeling that Shahid Masood is trying to create a soft corner for the potential 2013 contender in public’s eyes.

Obviously Shahid Masood can support any politician he chooses, but the question is whether or not in his capacity as a journalist would Shahid Masood extend the same gentle treatment to Asif Zardari whose failure the TV anchor began predicting from day one.

Journalists and anchors have a responsibility to the audience to act as a neutral moderator. Rather than trying to become best friends with Imran Khan, Shahid Masood could have asked his guest whether the Pew poll he mentions can be reflective of national support since it was conducted in majorly urban populated areas and reflected mostly the opinions of youth and urbanites, a vote bank not completely representative of Pakistan’s 180+ million population. He could have asked for details of how Imran Khan would address the issues facing the nation.

Showing favour to one politician over another one is not journalism, it’s campaigning. Shahid Masood should not pronounce Imran Khan as not competitive, but neither should he crown him as king. The people of Pakistan will choose their leaders, not the media elites. In order to make that decision wisely, the people rely on journalists to ask tough but fair questions of all politicians.

Journalists respond to Peshawar Press Club attack

Syed Irfan Ashraf has a great column in today’s Dawn about the dangerous and difficult job performed by journalists. Actually, this job is made dangerous by those people who want the media to be not fair and unbiased, but only pushing a particular point of view.

The article mentions a particular incident that highlights the unfortunate result of this pressure against journalists who are trying to do a good job:

All too often journalists find themselves in a tight spot. In a talk show a Voice of America host unexpectedly asked a local journalist in Swat as to who was responsible for violating last February’s accord for the implementation of the Sharia in Malakand — the Taliban or the army? The baffled reporter from Express TV reluctantly replied that it was neither the Taliban, nor the army but the people!

In this way the reporter tried to escape the wrath of the real violators by putting the responsibility on the victims. Unfortunately for him, this did not do the trick. He soon received a call from a militant who reprimanded him for spouting utter nonsense and for not telling the ‘truth’ that the security forces were responsible.

The two groups that are criticized in the article are militants and state agencies. Obviously, militants believe that they can threaten and silence the media, for example the incident of the Peshawar Press Club bombing. And there have also been some cases of state agencies putting pressure on individuals as well, not only in Pakistan, but in all countries. And there are, sadly, even some pressures from politically motivated media like the case of The Nation accusing reporters of being spies.

The result of this pressure and intimidation is that media starts to become distorted in order to avoid making any trouble. This can be seen in the case quoted by the article above, or in the case of pop music made in last year’s video featuring Ali Azmat talking about how Taliban is not a problem. In the video, even the Noori brothers say that they don’t want to criticize Taliban because they don’t want to be targets. These are famous pop stars! How can a typical journalist even compare?

With the many crises that confront our country, we need the facts about the situations in order to come to the right solutions. But the pressures from militants and others that have some political motivation against the truth are standing in the way of progress. It may seem like only a small thing to intimidate one journalist. But the truth is, it is as big as the nation. If the people do not know the facts, if their heads are always filled with crazy conspiracies, or if all the reporters and journalists are simply too insecure to be able to perform their jobs, the loser will not be the media only. It will be the entire country.