ISLAMABAD: “The collective mind of the people has been corrupted. Malala Yousafzai cannot live in Pakistan because a large number of people don’t like her. On the other hand, Mumtaz Qadri, who assassinated Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer in 2011, can live here easily.”

This is how senior journalist Ghazi Salahuddin summed up the level of tolerance in the country, adding that, unfortunately, media has added to problems more than it has made efforts to address them.

He was talking about the evolution of the media in Pakistan at ‘Media Landscape in Pakistan: Challenges and Opportunities’, the two-day annual conference of the Pakistan Coalition of Ethical Journalism, organised by civil society organisation Rozan, on Wednesday.

Journalists, practitioners debate pitfalls of Pakistani media

“The media has power and it can influence people, but people also think the media can change everything. I have the feeling that now, the media has become part of the problem,” Mr Salahuddin said. Internationally, the media is used for the betterment of the poorest segments of the society. But in Pakistan, this is not happening, he said.

“Thousands of students graduate every year, but the circulation of newspapers is not increasing. It shows that the habit of reading is decreasing,” he said.

Veteran editor Mohammad Ziauddin said both the print and electronic media were violating the journalistic code of ethics. “English newspapers are more professional, but their readership is very thin. Unfortunately, we used British colonial laws [to govern] newspapers in 1947, which caused a clash between the government and working journalists,” he said.

Former Radio Pakistan Director General Murtaza Solangi said that journalists had shown resistance under dictatorships, but now “everyone is getting a share, so there is less resistance”.

“Journalism should be done in the best interests of the people. Though the media is an industry, its job is totally different, so the aim should not only be to earn money,” he said, adding that the issues of the people were only discussed on social media.

In a discussion about the media’s role as an opinion-shaper, digital rights activist Nighat Dad drew attention to the portrayal of social media as an adversary of the mainstream media. Talking about how the mainstream would often ‘pick up’ stories from social media without adequate verification, she said that a “troll discourse” had formed, where subversive – and often paid – individuals would tag politicians or the military’s official accounts and ‘report’ users who they disagreed with.

Seasoned journalist Mazhar Abbas also chimed in, saying that once content from social media was published by a news outlet, it became their responsibility and they had to own the content.

The concluding session of the day dealt with gender quality through media and saw some lively discussion. Moderated by Sadaf Khan of Media Matters for Democracy, the discussion mostly centred around the coverage of women’s issues in the media, as well as the challenges faced by women in the field.

Senior journalist and activist Afia Salam told women reporters they had to create space for themselves to report on women’s issues. “Unfortunately, women reinforce stereotypes about women even more than men do,” she said.

Journalist Myra Imran said that she disagreed with the perception that health, education and women’s issues were ‘soft beats’, adding that “a beat where all one has to do is to report on a pre-prepared statement issued by the president or prime minister hardly qualifies as hard word”.

Rifat Anjum and Aneela Shaheen, who report from Peshawar, also shared their experiences candidly. Ms Shaheen pointed out that any woman who tried to make her mark in the field was dubbed ‘manly’.

“Unless the media can see a woman’s face, they don’t see her trauma either,” she said, adding that the media portrayed women solely on face value.

Ms Anjum explained that while reporters and field staff were sensitive to women’s issues, it was usually ill-trained or inexperienced newsroom staff who did not understand context and made unreasonable demands of them, such as asking them to obtain soundbytes from women in the tribal areas.

Psychologist Rizwan Saeed and Dr Bashir Memon from the University of Sindh at Jamshoro also presented their research, which compared coverage of major issues in the national and Sindhi press.

Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2016