Media urged to be objective, responsible
KARACHI: On a rare occasion, various journalists criticised their fraternity and highlighted the challenges being faced by them at a seminar ‘Free and responsible media: Issues and challenges’ held at the Karachi Press Club on Friday.
Senior journalist Mehmood Sham criticised the media for not playing its role towards the social development of the people. “How many real issues has the electronic media raised?” he asked. Sham said there was no investigative journalism in either the print or the electronic media. He said that today’s journalists who were tasting the press freedom should realise that senior journalists were through tough times and faced imprisonments, crackdowns and unemployment to attain this freedom. He said that journalists should work for the progress of the country.
Journalist and former PFUJ secretary general Mazhar Abbas said that in totality, the media was neither free nor responsible, and whatever freedom it had it was controlled.
He said that priority of the media was not to encourage ethical journalism but to increase their advertising revenues and programme ratings.
Abbas said that talk shows could be opinion-oriented but they should not be influential. He said the usage of language was important in the media and all journalists should be careful about what they said or wrote.
He also criticised columnists who used the media to get into politics or those who played their party line through the media. He stressed that the basic responsibility of journalists was to be objective and inform the public with honesty. Columnist Farooq Sulehria called for the revival of revolutionary newspapers like the Pakistan Times and Imroz in the form of websites, television channels and talk shows.
“We should report stories which are not in breaking news or talk shows,” he said and cited an example of people of certain area who protested in Islamabad when nuclear waste was dumped in their area. “Did anyone do a show on how many people died of cancer?” he asked.
Journalist Babar Ayaz suggested there was no editorial control in the electronic media. He criticised the media for airing provocative messages and said that whatever gibberish former home minister Zulfiqar Mirza said should have been omitted by the channels.
“In order to get rating, the channels kept on airing the clip again and again, provoking people, which led to so many killings.”
He said that in today’s time there was no investigative journalism. Instead, there was inspired journalism, in which a person “who gets a leash on a story does it without researching” about it, he added.
He said that today journalists started off their stories with opinions which should not be there. He said that the media instead of focusing on real issues often tended to mislead the public for their own interest.
Source: The News
Date:7/30/2011
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