Hajrah Mumtaz wrote an excellent piece in Dawn over the weekend about media credibility and how news organizations risk losing this vital piece of their business. Threats to media credibility are certainly not unique to Pakistan, but neither are these same threats missing. Also, our media is vulnerable to some of these threats at a time when the stakes are especially high.
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.
