Throughout history, man has been a slave to sensation. This is because unlike most didactic forms of persuasion, sensationalism appeals to the core of most human beings; their emotions. For example, if you hear on the news that crime in your neighbourhood is on the rise, you may be tempted to go out and buy a gun. But nothing you see in the hourly news broadcasts will ever make you write a letter to your local MNA or MPA praising his work in your constituency. This is partly because your local MNA or MPA is not likely do anything that can ever merit praise, but mostly because the media is not interested in telling you stories that make you feel content. Conflict is what drives news broadcasts and sells newspapers and that is what the media will bring you.
But lets not be too hard on the modern media. After all, playing it fast and loose with the facts has been a favourite pursuit of writers and philosophizers throughout the ages. Exponents of the ancient art of fiction are a living proof that making things up is far easier and less intellectually taxing than finding out the truth, or whatevers left of it. This ease is also responsible for another indistinctively human characteristic. The average human being tends to gloss over the facts and retains the headlines. Throughout history, we find examples of injustices where reasonable individuals have been accused of outrageous behaviour and then turned into examples of idiocy and subjected to ridicule for all time to come (though through no fault of their own).
The ancient Roman emperor Nero was one such victim of bad press. At the time of Romes epic demise, the otherwise frivolous autocrat wasnt actually playing the fiddle as all around him his empire burnt down. He was, in fact, engrossed in a top-level in-camera briefing with representatives from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the one-stop solution for all bankrupt ancient nation-states. Critics of primitive communism and other such absurd Marxist socio-economic systems would agree (albeit with a certain sense of irony) that even then, spiralling interest rates and rampant inflation were the architects of Romes downfall. But spare a thought for poor Nero, who was condemned by the scribes and papyrus writers of his time to an eternity of ridicule when his only fault was choosing Musicology over Economic Theory as his major at the University of Roma.
Marie Antoinette is another such casualty. In the years following the French Revolution, she was demonised for having ridiculed the starving Frenchmans plight by dismissing offhand their need for bread. Unfortunately, the phrase Let them eat cake was also conjured up by a journalist. Jean Jaques Rousseau, one of the great French wordsmiths of the 16th century, invented the anecdote which was to become the bane of Antoinettes existence till the end of time.
Do not make the mistake of assuming that contemporary news outlets are any more wary of printing plagurised or fictionalised accounts. A simple Wikipedia search for an article on United States journalism scandals can help clear any misconceptions that one might have regarding the infallibility of the first world. But can you blame them? William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pullitzer, the two men proclaimed as the fathers of the modern media, were quite open about their sensationalist tendencies and often boasted that it was their treatment of mundane goings on that drove the sales of their newspapers. For those who may not know, the Pullitzer Prize is today the most coveted title in all of journalism. So much for responsible reporting, then.
The temptation to fall into the sensationalist trap is enormous. Every day, local news channels feed us horse manure in the form of news reports and infotainment. A large chunk of these larger-than-life stories are usually concocted by over-zealous copy writers and editors, who often get lost in the beauty of their own prose and fail to notice the imaginary line between fact and fiction. This ailment is most chronic in the Pakistani English press, which is plagued by the evil of Mother Tongue reporting. What this means is that reporters who routinely think, speak and even misunderstand things in their own native tongue are put into a situation where they must translate their thoughts from said language into the currency of the coloniser, i.e., the parlance of English. To further confound the problem, the people who have the misfortune of editing (I use the term loosely) such material have little or no knowledge of the event they are describing in graphic detail. This is what leads to a multitude of gaffe, faux pas and other hilarious errors that broadsheet newspapers and other rags are wont to making. But you wont find such mistakes in this newspaper. At least, I hope you wont.
The writer is a broadcast journalist.
