The Webakoof mainstream media

It’s an interesting word fashioned for the current internet landscape. Webakoof. Noun. Definition: a person who believes anything he/she sees on the internet. Everything on Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter or on the web.

The internet, in general, and social media in particular, was supposed to end the champagne baths of the barons of old school media and put power in the hands of citizen journalists. But, on the flipside, these citizen journalists operate more on gut feeling and inherent biases than even the mere semblance of objectivity. The mainstream media, on the other hand, despite its corporate interests, passes all content through a vetting process. The print you see in a newspaper (or its website), or the footage and treatment you see on TV, would have passed through several hands in the pecking order within the organisation. Even if corporate or government interests were to subvert journalistic protocols, there is always the possibility that the professionals working within it would cry foul.

However, whenever this binary is cited, those opposed to the mainstream media are quick to point out instances like the infamous case of the New York Times confirming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. An ultimately incorrect claim that put the Grey Lady in the same league as an American redneck voter from the boondocks with a blog.

However, matters are infinitely more complicated when the mainstream media and the internet meld into an indistinguishable sludge, where you don’t know where one ends and the other begins. In the Pakistani channels, the bulk of the duties of the talk show producers is guest management and control room management. Next to nothing by way of actual research.

Now the social media is an excellent source of what are called “leads” in journalistic shoptalk; plenty of newsrooms, the one of this paper included, have benefited from it. Statements from the verified social media accounts of political figures have long since been considered their versions in news stories and, starting from the enterprising young coffeehouse owner who livetweeted the Navy Seals operation in Abbottabad, our “ainy shahid” list is becoming more and more diversified.

To state the obvious, these sources have to be spoken to, vetted and verified. There are all sorts of posers online, some conscious propagandists and others who are not consciously spreading propaganda but merely don’t have things right.

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A fascinating instance in this vein is the decision, back in April, by the Supreme Court to form a JIT to investigate the Panama Case. This is a story narrated by a bright young journalist, who wishes to remain anonymous and also wants the name of the university that he attended to not be revealed.

So it was a four-year degree Mass Communications program that our guy went to. This program offered two specialisations: Journalism (which he went to) and Advertising/PR. These two streams were bifurcated in the final year of their education.

Now these students, like everyone else, were eagerly following the proceedings of the Supreme Court. Some within the Advertising group started predicting the verdict. This was not taken well by the Journalism group. What do these smooth-talking PR morons know about the way of the world? It is us budding intrepid reporters who know what’s what.

So, just to mess with the heads of the Advertising students, they made up a “Short Order” of the Supreme Court. Keep in mind that they had made this one up completely out of thin air. To maintain some effect of plausibility, they did use some of the views that were at the time being attributed (correctly) to Justice Asif Saeed Khosa.

They then shared this “Short Order” on the WhatsApp group of the class at around quarter-to-two in the afternoon. The Advertising students fell for it. An inside joke of the department.

The decision to form the JIT was announced at two. By around quarter-past-two, these one of the journalism students, while checking his Twitter feed, started squealing with disbelief. Mubasher Lucman had tweeted an image of the made up short order. As had several other journalists!

Now, since Justice Asif Saeed Khosa indeed was one of the dissenting two judges that had wanted to disqualify the prime minister then and there, this fake short order was picked up by the television channels. Samaa started running it with its proprietary watermark; Dunya also ran it, as did ARY.

In his programme, ARY’s Kashif Abbasi took it apart, while reading it out. He even cut off the incorrigible Arif Hamid Bhatti and told him to hold the tabsara while he read out the “actual text.”

Even a casual reading of the order would have been enough to understand that it was fake. Not because the Hudaibia Paper Mills Case was ordered to be reopened according to the order (which it had not at that point in time) but because it was filled with typos and grammatical errors.

The young students were, by now, scared. As yet untainted by the rough and tumble of the Pakistani news media, they actually thought that they would be somehow criminally culpable for spreading false information.

Their teacher asked them to relax, as no such thing was going to happen; that the television news cycle will be over by the next day and that the fake order that they had made would be weeded out. But what about the print media, whose content had more permanence than television, they asked. Don’t worry about that, replied the teacher, newspapers are far more thorough in their research.

Jang, the nation’s largest circulated newspaper, carried information from the report in the next day’s edition.