Pakistani Media: A camp-follower

EDITORIAL:THE FRONTIER POST

Do our media too have to be a camp-follower of the political class, and not independent opinion leaders that they pretend to be? What indeed is the point in hosting talk shows so incessantly on the Supreme Court’s verdict on the Asghar Khan case and in featuring politicians as panelists, as are engaged various television networks so zestfully over these days. The political strands may have every vested interest to play up or play down the verdict in their own lights. They may have every motive to twist or slant it to serve their own political ends. But what interest could the networks have in bringing the shouting political panelists on the show again and again? The people at least are least interested in this circus when they know for sure what stance each and every political strand has taken on the verdict. They have heard and read it too often and can easily anticipate what a particular panelist was going to say even before he opens his lips. Or do the anchorpersons think that a PML (N) participant in their show by some quirk of miracle would confess that the Sharif Brothers had taken the money and then apologise? Or the PPP participant would concede that the facts were still to be established and full truth was still to be known? Why indeed are the networks so hell-bent on boring the viewers ad nauseam with the trite? Had their anchors been any imaginative they would have invited instead experts and legal minds to analyse the verdict objectively and dwell on its implications for the democracy project? That would have been both informative and educative. What they are putting out now is not even entertaining. Why really have the networks stooped so low? Why have they surrendered so grandly to be leaders and have submitted so slavishly to be mere hangers-on? These are virtually election times. The elections are almost on our head. And had the networks so desired, they could have guided and led the entire stump talk. The politicos across the spectrum remain enmeshed in politics even now. What have they in their plans for the people remains unknown. They do not speak of it. Had the networks been smart, they would have nudged them and diverted the entire political talk to this direction. Their anchors would have invited the partisans to their shows and asked them what have their parties chalked out for the people’s welfare and the country’s advancement. They could have quizzed them what are their plans for jobs creation and to address the galloping unemployment. What are their economic programmes, industrial policies and agricultural growth plans? What measures their parties contemplate for generating and augmenting revenues, what taxation formulas have they planned out and what segments would they focus on to create new taxpayers? What energy policy would they follow? Above all, what are their schemes for poverty alleviation? And what strategy would they adopt to face up to the menace of surging extremism and terrorism in the country? To put it in short, there are hundred and one such-like questions that the anchorpersons could have asked. The outcome would definitely have been a political discourse less about politics and more about nation-building. But playing vassals to the political class, the media networks have forfeited this lead role. Had indeed our media taken a leaf out of the book of their counterparts of the open polities, they would have been better off. There, the media networks are not mere cheerleaders. They are in effect real opinion leaders. It is the political class that takes a cue from them, not the vice versa. Here, the media have fallen to take a cue from the political class and play the ball it rolls out. And yet the self-assuming anchors and the commentariat lay the claim of being the pace-setters of the political discourse. They all need imperatively to revisit their act. Even now they can redirect the entire election discourse. Only they have to abandon what interests the political class and focus on what interests the mass of the people. But are we asking for too much? Perhaps.