How much freedom for the media?
The question how much freedom the media should have by itself is a sufficient indicator that it has assumed a disturbing particularity for society and state. What are those harmful aspects? To know them one has to look at the spectrum of the people running the Pakistani media. Our information environment is being run by five kinds of people:
– Chest beaters, who whip the national scene into despondency and want people to join them.
– Pessimists, who see nothing but calamities, problems steaming with no redemption in sight.
– Cynics, who repudiate everything, spreading negativity by ignoring the positive aspects.
Intellectuals, who speak with an air of superiority and think that they have the right to deprive people of their values, transposing them with a foreign agenda. They describe themselves as progressive and rational.
iOptimists, who never miss an occasion to criticise the wrong, but see light at the end of the tunnel.
The first four are seemingly sick, but they are not. Beating chest, sketching dark scenarios, spreading despair, inducing scepticism and cynicism is their chosen path. That there is a method to their madness is evident from their proclaimed agenda. They insist on using their right to express in order to change the primary characteristics of the state.
In psychological warfare, when an enemy state aims at destabilising the other nation, the weapons used are mostly psychic, non-material, including spread of despair, negativity, cynicism, low self-esteem, lack of confidence and disbelief in the future.
Likewise, those in tandem with their foreign sponsors keep on reinventing the wheel by resurrecting foundational issues already settled in the Constitution in the past, followed by stirring them up repeatedly till they become controversial, eventually losing their sanctity. Evidently, the intention here is to unravel the unifying bond that keeps the nation together. And who can do it better than the media? The secular lobby active in such pursuits is well known.
This is one side of the storm brewing, which no government really cared to tame or showed its grasp of the threat potential. The other feature is equally disturbing. In the conflict between the government and the media, the former clamps restrictions on it only when its nerves get tangled on the media’s criticism. It is on some such occasion that the government points its accusing finger at the media for being irresponsible, asking it to stay within the bounds. But the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) case is a different one for they want to do wrong and then desire that their dirty linen should not be exposed to the public.
Source: The Nation
Date:5/10/2011
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