Leashing the telemonsters

The decision by the South Asian Free Media Association to move court against Zaid Hamid, a rabid conspiracy theorist and televangelist, who clownishly refers to himself in the third person and embodies all that has gone wrong with Pakistan, and Meher Bukhari, one of the several telemonsters the idiot-box has unleashed on Pakistan, must be hailed. If SAFMA stays the course and the court takes the issue with the seriousness it deserves, we may finally manage to rescue a medium that has run amok and now poses a great danger to this country.

It is highly unfortunate that no thinking person in Pakistan can suffer the talk shows and their hosts that are the staple of news channels because these programmes are the real ratings pullers for these channels. The slide in the quality of these shows has been obvious to many and for a long time. Through this court case, we now have the opportunity to begin to unravel with some seriousness the several factors that have gone into creating this explosive situation.

It is a known fact that most talk show hosts – with some honourable exceptions – would fail an undergrad examination in any discipline known to man. The description which best fits them is one given of journalists by H L Mencken in his 1924 essay, Journalism in America:

“All the knowledge that they pack into their brains is, in every reasonable cultural sense, useless; it is the sort of knowledge that belongs, not to a professional man, but to a police captain, a railway mail-clerk, or a board-boy in a brokerage house. It is a mass of trivialities and puerilities. To recite it would be to make even a barber beg for mercy. There are managing editors in the United States, and scores of them, who have never heard of Kant or Johannes Muller and never read the Constitution of the United States; there are city editors who do not know what a symphony is; there are reporters by the thousands who could not pass the entrance examination for Harvard or Tuskegee, or even Yale. It is this vast and militant ignorance, this widespread and fathomless prejudice against intelligence, that makes American journalism so feeble and vulgar, and so generally disreputable.”

I have deliberately reproduced, at some length, this excerpt from Mencken’s essay. Please note that what Mencken is presenting here about the state of journalism and journalists in the United States in 1924 describes fairly accurately the state of journalism and journalists in today’s Pakistan. And the product is obnoxious and even more disreputable. There was no television in Mencken’s time. But we have that beast now in our midst and while there is a drastic need to improve the quality of journalism in the country in general, it is a measure of the superficiality of television that print, for all its weaknesses, and there are many, stands out as more professional.

What makes TV worse is its lethality. Even at the best of times, it is superficial. Combine that with its outreach, with nearly 98 million people watching terrestrial broadcast stations and cable channels and we can imagine the havoc they are wreaking on us. The fathomless prejudice against intelligence that Mencken talked about becomes the bottomless perdition to hell where we are currently destined to rest.

And while we are at it, let’s do another exercise. Imagine asking Ms Bukhari any question that demands, even remotely, a degree of sophistication of thought and complexity: it is difficult to envisage any answer that would disprove Mencken’s view. And while she may be a particularly bad case, she is not alone. Now add to this her ratings, her primetime slot, what she spews, and how she is considered a revenue asset by the channels and the result is the disaster we have to live with every day.

I had to watch the programme on YouTube after it acquired the infamy that she thrives on. It was a terribly painful experience to sit through her banshee wails and the remarkably dishonest and self-serving poppycock disgorged by Mr Hamid. This is not the place to deconstruct what she said or the direction in which she led that telegogue, though that is terribly important in itself. But it was a shameful exercise in reducing complexities to sound bites designed specifically to push a certain point of view, one that has been the bane of this country and which has brought us to this sorry pass.

At the same time, Meher Bukhari and her colleagues were not born monsters. They have been turned into monsters by a phenomenon that is bigger than them. They are the products and, in turn, producers of an environment which demands, and begets, the lowbrow discourse that we are subjected to. This template, favoured by the managements of all TV channels, supposedly bows to what the viewers want – which is a few thousand households targeted through a deeply flawed metering system – and then, by giving them what they want makes the channels become a victim of their own strategy to sell a product.

This madness has already gone on long enough. It must be brought to a closure. This is why I find SAFMA’s decision to go to court a good move. The host and her panelist must be made to give evidence of the calumnious statements made on the show. Since the media has so far failed to regulate itself through ombudsmen and a complaint commission, it must now be coerced into becoming more responsible. The 16-point code of conduct prepared by the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists in 2008 still awaits acceptance and implementation by the media houses. Perhaps this development will provide us the opportunity to finally rationalise our actions as providers and disseminators of news and stop the drivel we have become so fond of thrusting down the nation’s throat.

The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.