The G word

People in other newsrooms recycle and attempt to pass off as their own ideas the Jeem-team conjures out of thin air

If you caught El Jefe’s interview with Haji Hamid Mir this last weekend, you would’ve noticed how well the president ducked, weaved, dodged and cart wheeled his way through the minefield that the veritable primetime talk show host had laid out for him. It’s not that Zardari couldn’t answer the questions: he just didn’t want to. That the host kept taking waqfas for commercials every five minutes didn’t help either, and left many of us wondering whether he had been signed as the new spokesperson for family planning. But if you caught even a minute of the 55-minute-stretched-to-two-hours interview, you’d be struck by how well the Kingpin equipped himself. To be honest, it was not something that I was expecting from a man who had been accused of having a stroke, senile dementia and khakhi-induced-yellow-belly syndrome, just a couple of weeks ago.

Image management was at the heart of this particular media appearance and marked a watershed moment in the battle for the government’s (read PPP’s) public image. It is no secret that the Pee Pee Pee government has no love lost for the Jeem Group. It is also a matter of public record that government servants from all walks of life have been, formally and informally, told not to associate with Jeem Group journos, mostly because of their tendency to exaggerate, sensationalise, sex-up and misreport. Even the public at large has grown wary of the gall with which the Fox News of Pakistan fabricates and hyperbolises mundane events, until they sound otherworldly and uncanny, even to the most discerning of viewers.

Other channels, mind you, are not much better. In terms of content generation, where people in the Jeem newsroom make stuff up as they go along, people in other newsrooms watch, copy and attempt to pass off as their own the stuff that the Jeem-team made up and they (children of a lesser channel) recycled. It’s a vicious cycle, and the Jeem-ers know it. So there is a lot of leaking and cross-leaking of stories and before you know it, our media scene becomes just as incestuous as the American mid-west. Stories that would not normally air on one channel are leaked to a competitor; and when the competitor airs the said news item, imbecilic newsroom in charges with smaller brains than fleas begin screaming frantically at their reporters for not having broken the story first. Something is definitely broken here, and it’s not the story.

Speaking of broken things, did anyone happen to catch the return of the Mush-inator? In case you missed it, there will probably be a repeat telecast, but not on HBO (where it belongs). The APML jalsi (a shout-out to the PTI trolls who coined the term) was in many respects, like the Terminator movies. You knew that everyone was going to die in the end, but you still watched it all, waiting for divine intervention to strike. In the case of this particular jalsi, the moment everyone was waiting for was the arrival of Abu Hamza bin Musharraf, the baron of Chak Shehzad and the scourge of the Kargil sector. In fact, I was one of those ill-informed masses who thought that the Iron Man himself would miraculously appear on stage in a puff of smoke as the speakers at Mazar-e-Quaid blared “Do You Smell What The Rock Is Cooking?” Unfortunately, the video link from London was not as lifelike as Altaf Bhai’s telephonic decibel drama, and the APML-ites only barely managed to dub their outing an “earthquake”.

However, the subtext here is mind-blowing. You see, earthquakes are caused by tectonic plates in the earth’s crust shifting from time to time. Such shifts, when they occur underwater, cause immensely destructive tidal waves and juggernaut weather systems such as tsunamis. So in a way, Musharraf is trying to suggest that it is he who has ‘fathered’ the PTI tsunami of electoral success. Given that it was Musharraf who sparked Imran’s delusions of grandeur by offering him the premiership back in the early 2000s, the reference is apt. But only a fool with a mouth full of his own foot would argue that the APML offering was bigger, in any way, shape or form, than the PTI’s grand jamboree.

A lot has happened over the past couple of weeks. A lot is going to happen in the weeks and months to come. But whatever happens, we know one thing for sure: if it’s news, you can always trust the Jeem-team to break it down for you. Literally. We interrupt this newspaper column to bring you a special news update…

Follow @mightyobvious on Twitter for more incoherence in 140 characters or less