The following is the first post from Wajahat S. Khan’s new blog, My Name is Khan. The piece originally published in Aurora, Dawn’s Marketing Magazine, in 2006. Khan was launching Dawn News TV at the time, as Head of the International Desk. You probably know him best from his show TalkBack on Dawn. Today he is not only starting his own blog, but also he is writing some really excellent critiques of the media for the new journal Express Tribune.
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.
