Time for media to introspect
IF you follow the media, as I suspect most of us do, you would have realised that these days it seems obsessed with itself.
But are you so deeply interested in these media houses’ tiffs and tussles that you eagerly await the next news bulletin on TV or desperately reach out for the day’s newspaper to see front-page stories on them?
If your answer is yes, then you are certainly going to get more of your favourite diet. But, if your response is a horror-filled, emphatic ‘no’ to this steady stream of highly incestuous ‘news’ about how one or the other media group is failing us, then you may wish to switch channels and/or review your choice of newspapers.
Yes, you are the king and queen, royalty, for media organisations. Without you, the audience, the multimedia empires built by major groups and the power they wield cannot last. Their survival depends on the circulation figures for newspapers or the ‘ratings’ for TV audiences.
Page views (online content) will soon be an equally significant factor in the Pakistani market if international trends of media consumption are any indicator of the shape of things to come. Circulation, page views and ratings figures are crucial in determining the rate and quantum of advertising.
No rocket science is required to reach the conclusion that the higher the number in each of the cases, the higher the revenue of the media owner. How well they control their costs and how efficiently they produce their content will generally determine the financial health of a media organisation.
What does this mean? Simply, that the audience collectively holds the key to the survival of the media organisations. A little different use of the remote control or the subscription choice can make or break them. Hence, the competition between various groups to retain the maximum number of ‘eyeballs’ for the maximum number of hours in any given period.
Prior to the advent of the 24×7 electronic media, mostly TV, in the Musharraf era, the major competitors for the readers’ affections were two main media houses with Urdu newspapers.
While today it is ‘You saw/heard it here first’, it used to be ‘You read it here first’. The high-brow English language press remained scornful of this practice so much so that sometimes their disdain for the Urdu newspapers’ treatment of news extended to news itself. They simply missed it!
Nothing of the sort was witnessed in the two major Urdu newspapers. An anecdote narrated to me by a reporter of one of these newspapers best illustrates this. “I was summoned by the owner-chief editor because I had ‘missed’ an important story in my beat, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).”
“I was given a dressing down as to why I didn’t file the story that appeared in the rival paper. I checked and told the owner it was incorrect and that the CAA would issue a contradiction. The next day’s rival edition carried the denial. I couldn’t believe it when I was sent a copy by the owner with a red circle around it asking me why I’d missed that too.”
This mentality drove the Urdu newspapers to publish more and more news — occasionally, also create it. If you did that then the rival was bound to miss it. The argument that a ‘miss’ was an events-based miss such as a fire or violence or accident or even a press conference and not when a reporter had an ‘exclusive’, cut little ice with the owner-chief editor.
Therefore, beat reporters from rival newspapers often followed each other more than they did any story. Such was the fear of missing something the rival might get. It may have been ludicrous but was evidenced day in and day out.
After press conferences one or the other reporter was known to have feigned an exit only to fool the rival, return quietly from a side entrance and ask the dignitary that one question that wasn’t explored earlier and lead their story on it to show the rival down.
No matter how intense, this competition restricted itself to journalists and organisations competing against each other with content and, in most cases, content alone. The advent of TV news and a new cast of characters, the new generation of owners, changed all that.
What began with ‘We were the first with the breaking news’ or ‘First with the election result’, started to get more intense as the 2008 global economic downturn began to hit Pakistan’s economy and consequently the advertising market.
As the fight for the market share intensified, more and more players entered. The waters got murkier, the battles dirtier. There were other factors too. The ambition of some media owners to be active power players à la Rupert Murdoch and be perhaps bigger than governments was resented by others.
Some new entrants, who had primarily entered the industry in search of clout, having made tons of money elsewhere, brought an ever newer set of dynamics as they sought to enhance their power and protect their larger business/political interests.
Then the role of the media in the downfall of military strongman Gen Musharraf also alerted other strong players in the country who started to push their own agenda courtesy their surrogates in the media. Even the patriotism of rivals was questioned.
From intelligence agency agendas on foreign policy to bitter jealousies of the Karachi bourse; from influence-peddling on regulators to the differences of opinion on the role of the judiciary — all started to play out in the media. No, they weren’t competing against each other with exclusive news alone. They started calling each other names, attributing questionable ‘treasonous’ motives to output.
This is a highly perilous game. If it results in an overall slump in the credibility of the media then the media would have done to itself what dictators failed to do. Not least because this self-obsession is pushing public interest journalism lower in the priority list. Surely, a rethink is in order.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn. Email: [email protected]
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