Would Pakistan’s corporate media televise a revolution?
Sometimes events in a foreign context open up space to look into a local reality. When the recent spate for protests broke out in Istanbul’s Taksim Square on May 31, following a brutal police crushing of an environmental activist sit-in to prevent the commercialization of a park, mainstream Turkish TV stations, including the MNSBC-affiliated NTV and CNN Turk did not cover them.
An article in The Guardian asks the question, “How come the news did not get out even though all major media outlets had live transmission vehicles on the ground, and reporters were trying to do their job – being tear-gassed and subjected to police violence in the process?” The article goes on to state that “the answer lies in the ownership structure of the main media companies and government interference with editorial policy. All major media groups in Turkey are now part of larger corporations with diversified interests ranging from banking to the hospitality sector.”
For those aware of the intricacies of the Pakistani media, the ownership structure and the finance structure of the news industry in the Pak-land can be said to replicate a similar pattern. Therefore the question that emerges from Turkey can be asked in the context of Pakistan too. The neoliberal turn of the State, both visible in Pakistan and Turkey (also now business partners with Turkish private companies being given preferential contracts in Pakistan), was supposed to have made it more open and easier to criticize. In fact it has translated into a much more opaque context, in which neither the State nor the working of private capital are considered under the purview of the media. The new neoliberal state is in fact harder to criticize as it combines the carrot-and-stick offered by private companies with the whim of the state’s writ.
Some examples of the situation in Pakistan are due, where a ‘media revolution’ is supposed to have freed up the media to criticize ‘anyone and everyone’.
One of the most critical examples is a telephony giant. In at least two English newspapers a moratorium was placed on news stories or op-eds critical of its controversial privitisation process. This was after columns appeared in both newspapers critical of selling the once profitable state entity. The company’s media cell had made it clear to both papers that it would “no longer give them ads”. When the advertiser, even though it makes losses and covers them with public funds, refuses ads, it speaks the language that editors in mainstream media hear.
Similar media management was seen in how another privatized electricity company in Karachi managed the media to report against its striking workers in 2011. Resorting to the most brutal forms of violence, including hiring gangsters and former intelligence agency officials, the company offered both ads to newspapers and television channels (directed against the workers) and took around 23 journalists on an all-expenses paid tour of its Abu Dhabi headquarters. Back in the day this newspaper printed the then COO of the company admitting to as much seated at his temporary office at a golf resort in Karachi.
One of the classic cases is of purposeful misrepresentation of the Baloch nationalist movement. While the Baloch nationalists have long since established their bases in non-sardar areas in southern Balochistan, whenever (if at all) the mainstream media wishes to take the “Baloch opinion”, they call on the sons of sardars in exile, such as Harbayar Marri or Brahamdagh Bugti. The choice of ‘sardar’ or ‘sardar-affiliate’ to represent the Baloch cause is to reify the narrative built in the Punjabi/Pakistani imaginary: ‘Sardars are evil. Balochistan is full of sardars’. And thus that bombing them and killing and dumping Baloch in the name of the federation is ‘justified’.
As a political party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) does the task of keeping the media’s mouth shut the best. It micro-manages stories and offers ads in exchange for stopping a story. Only recently a media organistion stopped a story exposing rule violations in the pet Daanish Schools project in exchange for an ad campaign. A reporter told this writer when a major exclusive against the PML-N government in Punjab was blocked that ‘he would rather take a car from the party in question the next time’.
Some personal examples should illustrate the case in point. In one of the newspapers I have contributed I was criticised for naming names of organisations that funded it; in another there was an explicit ban on criticising the PML-N, the MQM, various multinational companies, the country’s largest real estate magnate, while another held onto an article regarding a private university of Lahore’s janitors tussle for two weeks before deciding not to run it. The problem at each end was the same: advertisers.
And while it is true that the question of media sustainability is a genuine one – with a number of media organizations in Pakistan and around the globe crippled by financial constraints – but the fact is that the moment you become advertiser is the moment you are no longer criticised. This is part of the reason why barely any ‘negative stories’ are published against multinational corporations. This writer has had stories against one multinational (‘drenching water supplies’) while another one involving another multinational (‘cracking down on unions’) rejected on the grounds of these companies being ‘major advertisers’.
The ‘spotless, clean and do-gooder’ image of the multinational employee is built upon a close micromanagement of the relationship between advertising in the right amounts and preempting negative stories and ‘nipping them in the bud’ as it were. Again, another specific example is due. A senior editor told this writer that when a fire broke at the Auriga Centre in Lahore, housing a wireless telephony company’s corporate office and the blame was put on the organisation, it asked all major newspapers to publish ‘its version’ and promised a front page ad as incentive.
While the situation in Pakistan is perhaps not as bad as Turkey, where 33 journalists are under arrest, it remains the “most dangerous place for journalists” with an equal number or more dead. Of course there is a difference between Turkey and Pakistan. While the police clampdown on protestors in Turkey was not televised or printed at all in the Turkish press, in Pakistan, at least the press dared to air brutally beating up protestors and entering their houses and humiliating their families after a protest against the outages by power loom workers in Faisalabad this Wednesday. However, the brutality against the protestors and their families did not make it onto the debate shows.
While self-proclaimed revolutionaries like Imran Khan or Tahirul Qadri, who call for nothing but an adjustment within the system, can be projected to be the ‘next big thing’ within no time, it is the actual working class resistance on the ground that gets marginal coverage in niche spaces within the media. And so we must return to the rhetorical headline and ask: will the Pakistan media televise a real revolution? The answer – and I do ask my friends and colleagues in the media to undertake a sober assessment – is no..
The writer is the general secretary (Lahore) of the Awami Workers Party. He is a journalist and a researcher. Contact: hashimbrashid@gmail.com