The media in Pakistan is facing its moment of reckoning. The crisis is three-fold.
First: truth, reason, rationality, fairness and national interest have increasingly been sacrificed by large sections of the media at the altar of ignorance, passion, prejudice, egotism and self-interest. Second: the economic slump is forcing existing print and electronic projects to downsize and new ones on the drawing board to be postponed or cancelled. Third: sections of the independent, bi-partisan and concerned media are under attack both from armed non-state actors and from those of their colleagues who are, wittingly or unwittingly, tied to new or old vested interests.
Ironically enough, leading media owners and journalists are largely to blame for this predicament. And the Musharraf regime looms dramatically in the backdropof the current media crisis. First, it facilitated the growth of a free media by opening up the airwaves to cross-media ownership and generously granting licenses without discrimination. Second, it jump-started the economy by flushing it with consumer liquidity and attracting foreign investment. This led to an advertising spree by banks and telecoms that sustained the rapid growth of the media. Such great optimism was generated that media owners threw caution to the wind and launched copycat projects, ignoring the limited size of the market and long gestation periods for profitability. This encouraged ill-trained and mediocre journalists to scale the heights because the resource pool was limited in the short term. Third, press freedom was not always tempered with responsibility or political neutrality. The media became a powerful political player in the transition to democracy in 2007, but with adverse consequences for state and economy when it mistook the budding “transition to democracy” for a “revolutionary transformation” of state and society. This destabilised the polity and undermined the economy. One of the most unfortunate aspects of the media’s overt political interventionism has been the aggressive politicisation of the lawyers’ movement which tried to usurp the role of political parties in mediating conflict and effecting political transitions. More significantly, the media’s rampant anti-Americanism, coupled with its hatred of the ancien regime, led it to express covert sympathy for violent non-state armed actors who have resorted to anti-state terrorism in the guise of religion. This has objectively promoted political intolerance, sustained debilitating religious nationalism, eroded the writ of the state, destabilized the transition to civilian democracy and hurt the economy.
In the end, all these factors have come to haunt the media and damaged its prospects and credibility. The economic slump has plunged all channels into deep financial straits. Downsizing is the norm across the media. The infuriating aspect of this desperate situation is that, despite these economic and political omens, many influential journalists are still hankering for an “honour” and “passion” based political and economic discourse that is alien to functioning and economically prosperous nation-states. Worse, they are still ready to attack those of their colleagues who disagree with them, often to the extent of calling them “American spies or agents” and inciting violence against them at the hands of aggressive anti-American non-state actors.
One example of this misplaced concreteness is the media’s response to the rise of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and the erosion of the writ of the Pakistani state. The second is the economic meltdown of the country and the arrival of the IMF once again to bail it out.
The predominant media view is that the war against Al-Qaeda/Taliban terrorists is solely America’s war and not Pakistan’s war, therefore the Pakistan army must unilaterally stop military operations against the terrorists. It is also argued that Pakistan should confront America militarily if necessarily in the tribal areas. There are two problems with this view: first, it forgets the fact that it was the Al-Qaeda/Taliban network that provoked an American military response in Afghanistan after 9/11; second, that it is the same network that has violated Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by occupying vast swathes of its territory. Therefore, objectively speaking, the media’s anti-Americanism, however well-placed, is playing into the hands of the Al-Qaeda/Taliban network and eroding the writ of the Pakistani state.
Similarly, the predominant media view is that Pakistan should reject the IMF out of hand, whatever the consequences of international default that is staring it in the face. This is the same unrealistic and emotional attitude that actually led to eating grass and inviting in the IMF following Pakistan’s tit-for-tat nuclear explosions in 1998 which precipitated an economic crash and undermined national security. We face much the same sort of situation today. Instead of putting our house in order by strengthening the democratic state, honouring its international contracts and tightening belts all round, powerful sections of the media seem bent on nurturing political anarchy and economic meltdown at home and isolation abroad.
The Pakistani media needs to take a close look at itself. It has won much freedom but demonstrated an insufficient sense of responsibility, especially in relation to the economy, to the nation-state and to the democratic transition underway. Now its histrionics are coming home to roost and it is hurting itself. Therefore it is time for Pakistani media owners no less than journalists to take stock and set the balance right.