Controversy and pseudo journalism
Philippe Lafforgue, the man behind the much maligned La Maison restaurant in Islamabad, has suspiciously vanished from our media’s glare, leaving us with a half-baked controversy. Considering Pakistan’s remarkable plethora of 24-hour news channels, and their dominance over TV ratings, it seems odd that news agencies would so abruptly let go of a story so promisingly lucrative.
After all, it had everything one needs to manufacture a collective experience of national angst. It trekked the impulsive terrain of our colonial subconscious; it irked our sense of shame; it had the white devil imposing his values through the cunning ruse of authentic culinary imports, that too on our land, and then having the audacity to ban us from indulging in his propagated values, even when we were willing to contribute towards his commercial gains. What sort of a man would not even let us buy our right to disobey the law? Has he no principles?
Everybody could and briefly did gossip about it; from the housewives to their chauffeurs, from the indifferent suits to the drawing-room politicians. For a few glorious weeks, we all felt a national solidarity that has been lost on us since 1998, when the Ras Koh Hills were razed by our then brand new and shiny nuclear weapons.
It could have gone for so much longer, it could have led to greater things, but the story fizzled out, and we never got to adorn Philippe with the gratitude he truly deserved.
Pakistan has countless private news channels, appearing at the end of every click of the remote control. The growth of the industry owes itself primarily to the abundance of dramatic events in Pakistan, but it also relies heavily on an unregulated competition for stories.
Moreover, since Musharraf’s downfall – which the media generously contributed to – a certain cockiness has become the staple tone of our news agencies, and this self-assured tone is replicated word-to-word in the plagiarised copies of stories published by smaller, web-based news agencies that do not have enough reporters on the ground to ‘break’ any stories. This leads to a wildfire of misinformation on social networking sites.
It is important for the future of ethical journalism in Pakistan, that we start monitoring the increasing trends of sensationalism. In the meantime, we can begin by offering Philippe a grovelling apology on behalf of our media, as well as the lynch-mob it managed to inspire with its nationalist overtones.
Certain key facts in the story were undoubtedly tweaked, others might have been given a steroid treatment to ripen them for commercial harvesting. However, before we elaborate on the misrepresentation of facts, it is important to understand some notions about linguistic manipulation in the media.
Analyse, for example, this very article: It has a pretentious (or ‘cultured’) title, and begins by identifying the subject as a foreigner with an unexplained connection to a controversial restaurant in Islamabad. Already, it is positioning him unfavourably by building upon an unfounded suspicion. It is emphasising his external origins, and subliminally suggesting that he might have nefarious links to the said controversy, which if you have not noticed yet, has still not been elaborated upon.
It further hints towards his culpability by using expressions that fabricate an expectation that the subject has fled the scene of crime, instead of being dispensed with by a ravenous media that simply had no use for him anymore. It employs culinary words in a quiet allusion to the fact that the author is in fact perceptive and clever, thus, trust worthy. This sort of over-confident, sensationalist rhetoric forges an immediate opinion that lingers in the background of the proceeding sentences.
Words are dangerous like that.
Now imagine if you restricted these capricious words to a capacity of 124 characters.
Spearheaded by the journalist Cyril Almeida, this controversy sprung forth from the shallow end of a Twitter campaign. Even the cautiously balanced Dawn conveniently failed to investigate a very important distinction that Cyril initially forgot to make: Had Philippe ‘banned’ Pakistanis, or simply disallowed Muslims in accordance with Pakistani law – the arbitrariness of which, I am told, he is well familiar with?
But such are the perils of limiting one’s journalistic ambitions to a Tweet.
Pakistani law restricts the sale of alcohol to Muslims, and moreover, the Pakistani government reckons that it is appropriate to identify a citizen as a religious creature. What this means is that Pakistani passports are also a form of religious identification, and perhaps this is where the misunderstanding lies.
In his interview with Newsweek, Philippe extricates his target customers as ‘expats and diplomats, and Pakistani minorities’ and lest we forget, Pakistani Minorities include non-Muslims.
We cannot be sure if Cyril Almeida was carrying his passport the day he was refused a table. Yet we are.
Conversely, we cannot be sure if behind all this fuss is the Pakistani elite’s spiteful outrage at being made subject to those laws they consider beneath them.
When we accuse Philippe of discriminating against Pakistanis, let us not forget that we have no moral high ground to gloat from; our restaurants exercise rampant discrimination against our own people, some of them existing as if citadels of nobility in Victorian-themed regressions, banning accompanying ‘servants’ from dining halls and reinforcing preferential notions of ‘respectability’ that are closely associated with religions of the working-class.
Are we being racist by making a scapegoat out of ‘the white devil’, simply because he denied us the privilege of exempted hypocrisy?
The most heart-breaking aspect of the matter is the deafening silence that presides over the fate of the arrested staff members, and the ceaseless perception of non-Muslims as non-Pakistanis.
This is expressed in subtle ways, such as news reports that explicate the absolutely unbelievable joy felt by Hindus in spite of Pakistan’s victory in a cricket match against India. Mr. Almeida might not be misleading us with his 124 character-based journalism, but we cannot be exonerated for our jaundiced attention for basic detail.
Sensationalism is not exclusively a product of cunning selection of information, but is often a combined effort between a rushed memory and a deliberate miscalculation – two things news agencies are the most prone to when operating in an unregulated vocational environment such as ours. But this environment is not only unregulated, it is vast and lacking in the mechanics of filtration. In order to sustain the abundant demands of more than 50 news agencies, one can expect reckless and catastrophic reporting to remain rife in the future.
So, if one can be absolved for ending an article with an evasive desperation, then perhaps, in a vague reference to the issues discussed in this piece, one can hope to take the liberty of issuing a concluding warning with yet another profoundly perceptive and devastatingly witty idiom: too many cooks spoil the broth.
