Issue 41 Vol II, June 15, 2007

E D I T O R I A L

Media under Fire

WORLD of journalism is in deep trouble these days or was it always like that. Whichever way one might look, the tribulations are a plenty. The powerful were always arraigned against any independent passionate voice, may be of the individual, group or of the media. There is not much to worry. But due note ought to be taken when British Prime Minister Tony Blair forced to vacate his office in view of the bloody Iraq war dares the world  with a dictum that media is  “a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits.”

Blair singled out one daring and fiercely liberal British newspaper, The Independent and let go the entire Associated Newspapers and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. quoting from a past prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, who borrowed an expression from Rudyard Kipling to equate the press's “power without responsibility” to “the prerogative of the harlot through the ages,” Blair was more abusive than argumentative. It's like saying all media are feral unless they agree with his policies. And, this is the same person that criticised the Russian President Putin’s record on press freedom. Blair also acknowledged, “We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging, and persuading the media.” Why? Because the New Labour was desperately seeking power after being in doldrums for 18 long years.

 Or when President Pervez Musharraf, a worn out general who had usurped power with the help of a mighty America, clamps down on media, stops the entry of newspersons into the parliament and jails upright reporters or lets them be killed by goons, extremists and other predatory forces.  It is bad, too bad, but perhaps all in the game.

It is good that Musharraf under tremendous pressure from the press, the public and international public opinion has temporality retreated. The ordinance outlawing the electronic media has been withdrawn. Yet President Musharraf underlined that he granted an unprecedented freedom to the media.  "I take pride in it that over 50 private channels were functioning due to my policies," yet as he says he is the benevolent provider of freedom of the press. The public or the media has no role in it and as if there has been no arduous struggle in that country.

Life has never been easy for Pakistani journalists. Media organisations; newspapers, magazines and television networks by their very nature   have an adversarial role to play. But in Pakistan, that hapless country which has been more under army rule during the past sixty years of its existence than under a democratic dispensation, it has been tougher for media persons to tell the truth. Initially right from 1950s, each ruler whether the one in uniform or elected through the ballot box would be tolerant of criticism and grant as the present ruler President  cum army chief  Pervez Musharraf  so condescendingly announces , some  freedom to  the press.

This relationship changes as corruption and misrule becomes intolerable and mere pretentious.  It is true about British media and as it is true about Pakistan and other countries. Media is under fire.  And it is no imaginary fire. Journalists in the poor and wild north west of the country are kidnapped and killed, in Sindh they are threatened, fired upon and jailed. Elsewhere, if the extremists and fundamentalists are not attacking, the government agencies are.

Media in England has sent a befitting reply to Blair. Here is what Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent wrote, “What clearly rankles with Mr Blair is not that we campaign vociferously on certain issues, but that he doesn't agree with our stance. What if we had backed the invasion of Iraq (like, for example, we supported the interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone)? Would he then be attacking our style of journalism? Of course not. We are unapologetic about our opposition to Iraq, the biggest foreign policy folly of our age, and we shall continue to hold him and his government to account.”

The other danger, sometime subtle and at times too obvious and even brash is the corporate control and attempts to manufacture information.  Big corporate bosses are now exploiting new technology to increase their reach expanding and controlling whole gamut of information, entertainment and dissemination of knowledge. The joke in India’s capital used to be that these journalists write on the backside of the advertisements. Now the advertisers, the big corporate houses direct and dictate news, both for the print and the television networks. In the process, the media and many journalists are so cut off from the public that they often go wrong during the run off for the elections and results leave them aghast. They need all the explaining to show how and why they were so off the mark. The recent elections to the Uttar Pradesh assembly are a proof of that.

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