Abdullah Saad

Pakistani media’s corporate interests and our threat perceptions

So it’s been a while since I last chose to share a few words with you folks. Sorry for that and hopefully you folks will respond kindly to my following entry.

Let me get straight to the point. We already know that Pakistan’s news media plays slave to its corporate interests. The aftermath of Saad Khan’s unfortunate death, if anything, only cemented the assertion that whatever makes news channels garner more viewer-ship and/or sell more copies of their news papers, is exactly what their anchormen and columnists will pitch in their talk shows and columns. And nothing else.

And what makes this practice all the more dangerous, in case of Pakistan (not withstanding the fact that we’ve essentially adopted paranoia as a state policy) is the fact that Pakistanis have started basing their threat perceptions (local and regional), on what these news channels report or what their favorite columnist states – without ever thinking or making a conscious effort at trying to acquire more facts or even points of view before making up their mind.

Most, rather all of us, are very much aware of the fact that the American public got played by their corporate media and their government into waging a war on Iraq based upon fallacious, misleading and downright doctored reports of presence of WMDs in that country. And how the entire exercise backfired on them.

And yet, when our own TV channels and newspapers try to ‘doctor’ our very own threat perceptions, we’re almost always eager to fall for the same bait. Why?

Think that’s not the entire truth?

• Well, tell me then, how is it that at one hand the media can get their hands on a ‘secret’ letter sent to Interior Ministry by the US ambassador to Pakistan (refer: US ambassador Anne Patterson’s letter to Rehman Malik, asking for a NOC for weapons of illegal bore being acquired by “Inter-Risk” a local security agency tasked with the security of certain American personnel and missions). And at the same time, have comprehensively failed, in the last 2 years, to publish the entire list of Red-Mosque students who perished in Operation Silence? The numbers of which, according to most of the reports emerging in the local media, is in thousands. Hint: What sells more?
• How is it that Hamid Mir, in his weekly columns, every other week – writes about alleged XE (previously Black Water) personnel openly brandishing automatic weapons in the capital city of Islamabad, threatening locals with impunity? And yet we don’t see a single news channel attempting to locate and actually ‘video-tape’ or ‘photograph’ these personnel? If they’re really out there in the open, walking or driving down our streets, what’s stopping the mainstream media from openly disclosing their presence? I can only think of two reasons:
  1. Either the local media is actually a party to the crime and is actively responsible for hiding their presence.

  OR

  2. They’re trying to garner more viewership for their channels and more sales for their newspapers by playing on our threat perceptions. Whilst no such threat actually exists.

This is not to suggest, that their assertion is essentially ‘wrong’. Specifically since in the aftermath of the leak of the letter from the US ambassador to Rehman Malik, the government acted by raiding the offices of Inter-Risk.

But that if such a threat actually exists, why do they spend thousands of hours ‘talking’ about this issue. When they can always set up an investigative team, tasked with capturing these folks on film, thus actually putting something concrete on the table.

From where I see it, they don’t do it because XE or no XE – the media doesn’t care as long as it can get the largely unsuspecting population to believe what IT HAS TO SAY. Our national security policy is essentially being tailored by news channels, or so it seems.

I might be wrong on both counts, so I’d really like to know as to what do you folks have to say about this?