Fox off!

And this is how it goes: You watch a typical news report on a Pakistani television channel, all blood, fire and death, and you feel angry at the government. True to form, the channels repeat the pictures and you just shake your head, but continue to curse the government. Of course, all day long the pictures keep repeating themselves on the screen and you start to feel sick and disgusted, now more in a general and apolitical manner, until a time comes when you start cursing the TV channel. Then when you run out of curses and start viewing the gory visuals as impersonally and casually as you’d watch a stupid reality show. Because in the end, it becomes nothing more than entertainment.

So I wonder, what is sicker? State brutality or the brutality being turned into a sensational slide show by the channels to improve their ratings and attract viewrship?

There are those who insist that Pakistan’s electronic media has finally come of age. I disagree. It is not even half way there. It was enjoying a honeymoon period and we enjoyed it too, but, of course, stretched honeymoons start seeming downright cheesy and a moment comes when its time to go back to reality. This is exactly what has happened. Sheer sensationalism and an over-enthusiasm to “report” (and thus glorify?) certain social and political issues by the channels started to look like desperate acts that had less to do with causes such as “democracy” and “freedom of the media,” and more with the usually cynical business dynamics of the channels.


Most news channels had started to operate on a proven formula that is usually followed by the mainstream Urdu press. This formula suggests that newspapers that cover events and issues oitched against the sitting government bag more readership and thus circulation. Karachi’s “eveningers” have always banked on this formula. However, it is also true that these “eveningers” have always been read as entertaining tabloids (in which pictures of blood and gore are casually placed besides sleazy news items and photographs).

In other words, as a rickshaw or a Taxi driver in Karachi would tell you, these “eveningers” are just “time pass.”


The quality of the coverage of the May 12 events and the CJP issue by most television channels, though elaborate, was riddled with insensitivity, haste and populist hog-wash (in the name of “analysis” and “political discourse”). It was the kind of “journalism” cynically practiced by most Urdu tabloids.


Though I found almost all of my fellow journalists at the Karachi Press Club enraged by the PEMRA notices served to some of the country’s major television channels, and cheered when pictures of journalists protesting against the action in Lahore started beaming in, the truth is when I started to talk to the so-called common man in places like Zainab Market, Saddar, Nazimabad and Boat Basin, most of them (without praising the government or PEMRA), said that the television channels had “gone overboard,” especially with their coverage of the May 12 violence and the CJP issue.


This got me thinking about something else that ought to have been covered but wasn’t by these channels: The people’s views on the issues that were being highlighted so excitedly by the channels. Apart from an episode of Live With Talat on Aaj TV in which a lady represented a general feedback of the viewers, and a few letters read by Dr. Shahid Masood (most of them critical of Geo TV’s (over)-coverage of the CJP rallies), one hardly ever saw anything else in this respect by the front- line news channels.


It was the same old thing over and over again: Sensational pictures of rallies and carnage, followed by live interviews with foaming politicians (both from the government as well as the opposition), tons of talk shows with more foaming politicians followed again by more pictures.


The nature of most “talk shows” on these channels is such that one starts to feel they are watching a Pakistani political version of the Jerry Springer Show!

“Bandar ka tamasha,” (Monkey act), as one shoe store attendant in Karachi’s Zainab Market aptly put it.


It is apparent that topics and issues that require a detached analysis based on knowledge, research and especially an informed show of sensitivity on part of the channels, get slaughtered and sensationalized on most “talk shows.”

This seems to have made most talk show hosts and their guests intellectually lazy, because to them as long as their populist and loud (but hollow) rhetoric and antics turns them into “stars”, they are okay. Never mind the political, social and economic reasons behind the issues, in the end the issue is more likely to be trivialized into a mindless shouting match between the government and the opposition.


Eventually it seems that at least most of the politicians who liven up these shows are more suited as contestants on the American Idol or Aaj TV’s Super Keraray, rather than politics.


Pakistan’s electronic media now stands being completely Foxed! In other words, as media commentates with neo-con-leanings praise and glorify the commercial success of the sensationalist style and formula adopted by the United State’s Fox TV, more and more news channels all over the world are following its lead. The only difference is that Fox TV remains to be blatantly pro-Bush and “the neo-con agenda,” whereas channels trying to go the FOX way concentrate on (sensationalized), anti-government events.


What is being lost in this translation is that this formula can only succeed if (1) the channel is blatantly pro-government and (2) unabashedly right-wing in its policies. This gives it the cushion and comfort of being “obviously patriotic” and sensationalist (without getting into trouble with the state or the government).


On an international level it is a rather disturbing happening. “Centrist” and even apparently “moderate” channels like the BBC and CNN are being given a tough time by FOX TV and the likes. However one can take a sigh of relief in the thought and fact that there maybe more people watching FOX TV, but its impact has more to do with news as entertainment than anything a tad more serious.

Because rest assured, channels like the BBC and CNN (even Al-Jazeera), remain to be the ones whose coverage of events make a more serious impact on policies and the people.


Pakistani channels are well within their right to register their protest against PEMRA, but I think they’d be better off doing a bit of soul searching and self-criticism as well. The honeymoon is over, and the post-honeymoon period usually constitutes a seriousness and thought that has nothing to do with blood-soaked pictures put on a loop or talk-shows that can even give Jerry Springer an inferiority complex.