I WAS at brunch a few weekends ago at a packed cafe when I saw a TV anchor, dining, presumably, with his family. This person has been on our screens since the liberalisation of the electronic media in the early 2000s, and I have seen him on two occasions off screen in different circumstances, including at a restaurant, but both times, surrounded by a crowd of people eager to talk to him. This time, however, I was struck by how his presence at the cafe did not seem to faze anyone. Maybe no one is fazed by anyone’s presence anymore, because the realm of celebrity has widened courtesy social media, or maybe a primetime news anchor doesn’t rank high in the rung of celebrity.

The clincher came when I passed a family at a table where presumably the father was telling his children about this anchor’s presence. I squeezed past in time to hear the kids say “who?”, and I knew these kids thought TV news was DOA (dead on arrival). I understood this from my recent time instructing undergraduate students — who held a physical newspaper for the first time in their lives for a class assignment (sob) and thought most TV news was ‘compromised’. My journalism students, meanwhile, aspired for TV plus digital screen careers. I wonder what my future students imagine as an ideal career in journalism.

I chatted with Umer, one of my students from the Master’s journalism programme in 2017, to ask if he was surprised the youngsters did not know the anchor. He said he was, because he thought TV still played an important role in Pakistan, but “as I say this, I can’t remember the last time I watched TV” save a few clips from Shahzeb Khanzada’s show on X, “as he does good journalism”.

The quality of TV production in Pakistan “is so outdated”, he added, and it doesn’t cater to audiences who consume news/ information/ content on social media platforms. “Them not knowing [that] anchor is an indication that things are changing very fast,” Umer said.

It is about being fair and transparent in reporting.

A part of me thinks maybe this is just the way of the world — out with the old, in with the new.

So the kids don’t know anchors on a medium they don’t watch. Is that a big disaster?

No. But the bigger question is how well-informed the non-TV watching audiences — young and old — are and, I suspect, we all know the answer to that.

And the news media has itself to blame for this.

Social media took away their role as the gatekeepers of information, but how did the news media fight back to reclaim their role as an institution that holds the powerful to account? Pretty badly, and it is not the fault of journalists and editors who have been at the forefront of fighting against censorship. It is because many media owners’ goal was driven by profit, not public interest; and this is the real tragedy.

You can see this across the media landscape in Pakistan, where channels’ partisanship is evident to all. Disinformation reaps rewards. And the mainstream media suffers.

One small example is the folks who tell me they stopped reading this paper because they feel it is anti-PTI. I tell them Imran Khan himself told this paper’s court reporter in January that he was surprised the paper, which he thought was opposed to him when he was prime minister, was covering his trial and giving him good coverage. This tells you about the lack of understanding about journalism. It isn’t about being pro-him or anti-him; it is about being fair and transparent in reporting.

Against this backdrop, I don’t think news organisations should worry about attracting younger audien­ces as much as they should think about winning back audie­nces who left because the news went from informing consumers to entertaining them.

This crisis of credibility isn’t unique to Pakistan. In its annual report on digital news, the Reuters Institute at Oxford University found that 40 per cent of its respondents in 47 markets said they trust most news. This is a depressingly low figure.

Younger people, folks with lower income or less formal education, tend to trust the news less. Incidentally, these are also the groups the news industry does not target or serve, so it’s no surprise they do not trust the news. Reuters also found that “people’s relations with the media are often influenced by political orientation”. They want their news outlets to reflect their views. The good news is that, by and large, people want news outlets to adhere to high standards, show freedom from bias, and treat people fairly.

The challenge for the news media in winning and maintaining trust, as the authors note, is “to show that they live up to these expectations”. It is not an insurmountable challenge, but it requires a major rethink on how to present the news to audiences that don’t think they need it.

The writer is an instructor of journalism.

X: LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2024