The media and the party
The president has a complaint or two when it comes to the media. Some of these complaints are valid, some aren’t. Both sides have erred and both sides need a measure of introspection.
When he said that the premier and his family have fallen prey to some sort of smear campaign, he wouldn’t have had many sympathetic takers. The first family, as it were, have a lot of crimes to clear their names from before allegations of a witch hunt are to be taken seriously.
And it doesn’t just stop at them. The ruling party as a whole doesn’t have a squeaky clean image. The rental power case, though nothing has been proven yet, has in it what seems to be the seeds to some serious wrongdoing. Apart from procurement scandals, the license raj and the permit rackets are in full swing, as are irregularities in employment quotas. In fact, the latter have almost stopped being classified as wrongdoing to begin with. Much is wrong. In the midst of all of this, should the media be expected to hold anything back?
Having said that, there is a feeling, increasingly being realised by the public at large, that the media, especially certain sections of the press, really have it in for ruling party. The smarter ones among this pack of journalists and pundits manage to dress up their bias well, but even this relatively suave group lets go of the pretense of logical debate and bare their teeth, partially hidden by all that froth.
What are the reasons for this? Surely, this government, it has to be acknowledged even by the harshest of its detractors, has never suppressed the press. One reason for the rage could be that an anti-government position sells. It draws greater viewership. At any given point in time, the demographic disaffected with the incumbents is too huge not to zero in on. Secondly, and this is particular to the ruling PPP, this is not a party that appeals to the urban middle-classes. It is this latter demographic from which the bulk of the country’s press is culled from. By this second argument, the League gets better press. Its government in the Punjab is criticised, yes, but not in the cycloptic, no holds barred sense that the federal government is.
