Of blood is a better story to sell, or should it?

One of the fundamental problems with Pakistani media is to treat news more as a commodity than as a social good. This crude concept leads journalists to use fancy words, metaphors, proverbs, and emotionally-charged arguments etc which exaggerate or misrepresent the meaning. For example, “When we say ‘the man is a lion’, we use the image of a lion to draw attention to the lion-like aspects of the man. The metaphor frames our understanding of the man in a distinctive ‘yet partial way’. One of its interesting aspects is that it always produces this kind of one-sided insight. Another interesting feature rests in the fact that metaphor always creates distortions. The man is a lion. He is brave, strong, and ferocious. But he is not covered in fur and does not have four legs, sharp teeth, and a tail!” states Morgan in ‘Images of Organization

The commodity concept also pushes TV journalists to use high pitched tones – often choosing to report heavily on juicy aspect of stories with shock value rather than reporting on more pressing issues to the general public. One might say that if media is reflecting the society, then these sensational ways of speaking are justified, considering that Pakistanis are nonetheless loud and emotionally charged people, relative to say the British. But then there is something called ‘Adab-e-Mehfil’: simple things like not speaking before one’s turn, not speaking loudly and so forth. Plus, it would not hurt to ask TV guests to present cultured and educated way of argumentation, based on facts and logic, instead of campaigns of slander, filled with cheap tricks and mocking undertones.

A related part of the problem is: ‘If It Bleeds, It Leads’ to borrow the title of Mathew Kerbel’s famous book. This implies that media in Pakistan is obsessed with the short end of the problem, or the symptom as it is quite rightly said. The challenge of social inequities, usually the root cause, rarely gets air time ¦at best a personalized story or a documentary and then, move on to something more exciting such as a blast.

Selective freedom

Then there is the question of selective freedom, that is, Pakistani media criticizes the government a lot for its wrongdoings, but when it comes to highlight-ting the wrongdoings of private firms, it’s a big hush. These double standards perhaps stem from the premise that one mustn’t bite the hand that feeds. However, if Pakistani media is really as righteous as it claims, then it should as an industry, also raise issues relating to the corporate sector.

Advertisements would still come if all media firms unite and eventually corporations would have to mend their act to be responsible citizens. But wait a minute. This situation is more complex, because most big Pakistani media firms have ‘other’ businesses too, thereby creating a big question on their so-called independence.

Let ethics decide newsworthiness

It might be of public interest to show that a certain building made by a certain contractor collapsed, or a certain man opened gun fire in a shopping mall; but it is certainly not in the public interest to show a zoomed close up of a weeping mother, a bleeding child, or scenes of guns going rampant. A wide angle shot will do just as good.

When it comes to grief there is a simple principle: let mourning be private. And when there is violence: speech is better visuals. These might be moral limitations, but the general finding from a great deal of research is that exposure to violent portrayals (includes related grief) in the media increases the probability of several negative affects. The most often tested affect is learning to behave aggressively. Two other affects – desensitization and fear – are also becoming increasingly prevalent, according to James W. Potter on Media Violence.

This implies that in newsrooms, when evaluating the newsworthiness of a story or footage – the morality of the situation should be assessed first before editors evaluate other journalistic ethics such as accuracy and so forth.

Lack of sincere efforts

Disregarding whether media ethics is subjective or not, the case against the Pakistani media is their lack of empathy towards its critics. At one end they would construe government regulations as a clamp on free expression, but at the other end there are no visible and concrete signs of self regulation. There is hardly a media organization which has an ‘ethics and compliance department’; a department which is independent of, and has the right to supersede over-eager editors trying their best to sell their news; a department which must be consulted by reporters and editors in case of ethical dilemmas, without any regard to timeliness of the scoop.

The following suggested measures can mend this problem:

Set up an ‘ethics and compliance department’, which, besides the functions discussed above, should also offer a ‘hotline’, where anonymous calls can be made for any query regarding a dilemma or a complaint against any employee and so forth. Subsequently, consider failure to report by an employee having knowledge of an unethical behavior, as an accomplice to the issue.
Draft case studies of ethical dilemmas and take opinion polls on those issues in order to understand how the public expects media to behave on challenging controversial content. Blogging is also an option in this regard.

 Set aside a section of the newspaper/air time (weekly/fortnightly or whatever deems fit initially) where a panel of experts shall discuss the errors made during the period under review, debate controversial issues and take questions from viewers. One might also like to consider that the panel should not be of senior journalists posing as polymath experts, but those having adequate academic and practical understanding of society, morality and ethics.

 Lastly, it is pertinent to note that, barring few exceptions, media organizations (even giants, which have ample funding available) barely invest in human capital. Most training sessions are typically confined to technical aspects of production, in the case of e-media; the print media rarely sees this, thanks to the declining state of the industry. In this context, media firms should ensure that journalists should have at least some sort of academic understanding of their main beats. Learning on the job without having a basic understanding of the subject and its history, is clearly unsuitable in present times.

These measures of course are not the end in themselves, but the means to an end and thus they have to be improvised further. And although these tools will not help completely eliminate the grey, it would certainly aid the industry to at least identify and derive general guidelines for subsequent use.

Yet with all its fallacies, the Pakistani media is perhaps the last straw to keep our country as crippled democracy, afloat. And it can also be a strong voice of reason much needed in these disillusioned times of political and economic turmoil. Let us work together and let us not shun it.





Provided By: Zahra Lallani
http://www.tbl.com.pk/clashing-views-on-media-ethics-in-pakistan/