Back in 2012, when Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s Saving Face won the Oscar award for best short documentary, there was widespread resentment in Pakistan. That it was a political move designed to make Pakistan look bad.
Now politics does play into the decision on who gets the award. The votes of the Academy — the electoral college, so to speak — are quite large in number; large enough to be manipulated. Ms Chinoy herself would admit that her subject matter certainly ticked off many of the boxes that would make for an ideal international documentary, giving her work a leg up on some far better crafted documentaries.
But, after seeing the film, if the first impulse in our minds is not that something should be done for the welfare of the poor acid attack survivors but a resentment at how Pakistan is “represented” in the international media, there is something seriously wrong with the national psyche.
The conspiracy theorists even chose to ignore that one of the documentary nominees that very same year was The Invisible War, an American documentary on the rape problem within the US military. For the American cultural establishment to not only make such a scathing critique of a military (one that is at war) but also for it to be nominated for such a big award just slipped through the cracks in our minds.
Consider the following report (online viewers only) on the boy who cut off his own hand because he thought — nay, was told by the local imam — that it was a blaspheming appendage.
It has been shared by Zem TV on Facebook (a piece on which is long overdue in Media Watch) with the caption
The report in question involved an artist’s 3D-rendered representation of the event. Most of the time, those are silly. But one fails to understand what “masala” there was in the report.
The surreal, macabre reality of the act itself did not lend itself to any embellishment. This was a case of fact being stranger than fiction; Monty Python couldn’t have come up with it.
Even a lot of the resentment against Malala Yousafzai also stems from this obsession with good image. Since any move recognising her courage implies that there are some girls in Pakistan who found it difficult — or impossible — to go to school, the more fortunate people in the rest of the country, including well-educated, westernised and affluent young women in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad resented her fame. Because of the extra couple of questions about the situation that they might have had to answer on their next visit abroad.
*****
Any foreign news report covering the desecration of the places of worship of minorities — or even those of Muslims — is resented more than the acts of violence themselves.
Any possibility of, say, the presence of ISIS in the country is resented for mere branding reasons, not the spectre of terrorism itself.
Why isn’t there any positive coverage, ask our nationalists. Often forgetting the fact that — even though they aren’t bound to cover the country the way we would like them to — the foreign media is, in fact, on the lookout for feel-good stories from Pakistan. I can say this from a considerable experience and interaction with the international news media based in Pakistan.
*****
If the local nationalists here do not recognise that the biggest responsibility of the foreign press is to report the truth, not uphold the image of Pakistan, then it is absolutely difficult for them to extend any such understanding to the local media.
For the local journalists to explain that their first responsibility is to the truth and not any definition of “national interest” is going to be interpreted as treason.
National interest for the journalists should, in fact, be reporting the truth, regardless how unpalatable it might be.
The truth never damages a cause that is just.
