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News slants steepen in Pakistan’s booming broadcast media
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The average cable television viewer, anywhere in the world, would be hard pressed to recite from memory the weekly programming schedule of the news channels they watch. Not in Pakistan.
From 7pm until midnight on weekdays, without exception, all of Pakistan’s cable news channels broadcast the same schedule. The evening starts with a news review programme at 7pm, followed an hour later by a political chat show, the news at 9pm, and another political chat show at 10pm, while another political news review programme rounds off the evening at 11pm. The issues under discussion are always the same, as are many of the panel members. Indeed, it is often possible to track a politician as he moves from one channel’s studio to the next, making identical points and arguments.
Not surprisingly, this duplication is to the detriment of programming quality. In the nightly fight for ratings, talk show hosts compete to outdo each other’s histrionics, with the frequent result that journalistic integrity takes a back seat. A handful of broadcast professionals who were groomed in the West by the likes of the BBC and PBS have since returned “home” to support the development of Pakistan’s cable news channels. Many of them are dismayed by what they have found.
“The colleagues I often debate with tell me this is what the audience wants – they want these talk shows where there is fisticuffs going on, they want the anchors to throw in their opinions,” said Saima Mohsin. In 2006, Mohsin left the UK’s GMTV to become the “face” of Dawn News, which was, at the time, Pakistan’s only English-language news channel.
“My argument is that the viewers don’t know what they want until you give it to them,” she said. “I think [we have] missed an opportunity, because the media does play a huge role in the development of society. It is irresponsible. In a country where most people might not be able to read or write, but they can watch and listen, the power of the [broadcast] media is huge.”
That is especially true in a society where the development of the cable news media coincided with a wave of terrorist violence that has claimed thousands of Pakistani lives. The growth of the industry has been fuelled, in part, by a collective fear of crowded public places considered to be vulnerable to Taliban bombs. In turn that has cultivated a siege mentality that the news channels have plugged into, often blurring the line between fact and opinion in their pursuit of ratings.
“In the real sense, over the last six years, the tone of the media has made Pakistan more claustrophobic and introverted,” said Aamir Ghauri, a former news director at ARY and Dunya channels.
The bias of Pakistani TV news is also widely blamed for fanning a recent wave of religious intolerance. Earlier this year the worsening religious climate led to the assassination of two reformist politicians – Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab province, and Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian who was the federal minister for minority affairs.
“There is a premium on people’s [political talk show hosts] ability to raise their volume and to immediately begin to quote scripture,” said Mosharraf Zaidi, a Canadian-Pakistani public policy expert and commentator based in Islamabad.
“Pakistan is made up of a very devout population of Muslims, and what I think a lot of journalists try to do is to exploit people’s religious sensibilities and feelings to promote a very specific agenda. I think this is dangerous.”
We chat at Table Talk restaurant in Islamabad’s Kohsar Market. It’s an ironic choice of venue: this is where a police bodyguard shot Mr Taseer dead as he ate lunch. The market has since been renamed in his honour. It remains a favourite gathering place for many political show hosts and politicians.
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One consequence of the competition between hosts is that it may have made their TV channels susceptible to manipulation by political interests. The most important adversaries are the elected government and the military, which has ruled directly for about half of Pakistan’s history and still exerts enormous power behind the scenes. Aamir Ghauri believes that many leading political talk show hosts who consistently target president Asif Ali Zardari are part of a military campaign to undermine the fledgling democratic system.
“In the last four or five years, Pakistan has experienced unprecedented freedom of expression, but in the real sense, there is very little freedom after expression,” he said. “If you discuss the real issues and actors of Pakistan, either you’d be picked up [kidnapped], or you’d be contacted – and we both know who by.”
Ghauri’s view is endorsed by several broadcast journalists who have tried to report the corruption within the Pakistani military or its leadership’s connections with Afghan and anti-Indian militants. Yet Mosharraf Zaidi insisted that it was inaccurate to single out the military for using the news channels as propaganda tools, or to conclude that the broadcasters were failing in their job to cover the news.
“The story of the media in Pakistan can’t be told without the influence of the state on the media,” he said. “It’s fashionable to talk about the [military] intelligence services and the lies that are perpetuated by them. But I have a fundamental problem with that narrative. The more fundamental problem is the more malignant, but seemingly benign, things that everybody knows about, but nobody talks about – things for which we have proof.”
The biggest media advertiser, for example, is the government. That gives the government leverage to block, plant and spin stories, with political talk show hosts being the easiest means of dispersal.
Zaidi cited recent coverage of the arrest of Raymond Davis, a US intelligence contractor arrested in January for shooting two alleged muggers in Lahore. The news channels pursued the story with a vengeance, highlighting it as an example of US interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs. The resulting controversy strained already tenuous relations with Washington, before suddenly evaporating in March after the victims’ families accepted bloody money payments from a hitherto unknown source.
The news channels asked the right questions, said Zaidi, but fell prey to manipulation when it came to the answers.
“All of the details of the Davis case came from where?” he asked. “They did not come from the brilliant investigative work of a Pakistani journalist. They came from concerted leaks made by the Pakistani state, both civilian and military agencies, both intelligence and non-intelligence operatives, both the provincial and the federal government. The entire Pakistani state orchestrated the outrage.”
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As minister for information from 2002 to 2006, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed oversaw the legislation that allowed print media houses to expand into broadcast news and sparked what is commonly referred to in Pakistan as the “electronic media revolution”. This liberalisation was all the more remarkable for occurring under Gen Pervez Musharraf’s military dictatorship, as it had been denied by earlier democratic governments.
At the time the new law was widely considered a concession to media proprietors. In return, they offered only mild criticism of Musharraf’s administration, and particularly his failure to step down, as he promised to do, within three years of the 1999 coup that brought him to power.
That unspoken agreement held firm until 2006, helping the general earn high public approval ratings. It fell apart when Geo News, Pakistan’s leading cable news channel, threw its weight behind a rebellious judiciary. Ahmed was sacked from the information ministry and Musharraf went to war with Geo, a move that many believe contributed significantly to his downfall. It also established the news channels as a powerful political stakeholder.
“The electronic media is a star of politics now,” said Ahmed. “Previously, there were only three stars: the army, the president and the prime minister. Now, the independent judiciary and electronic media are also counted. The media has emerged as such a powerful element that everybody is afraid of them.”
Ahmed said he publicly predicted his own defeat in the February 2008 general election. Since retreating to the political sidelines, he has become the favourite guest on many talk shows. Part of his appeal is this penchant for soothsaying, and most of his predictions involve the collapse of the government and another spell of military dictatorship.
A number of channels have asked Ahmed to become a talk-show host himself. He claims he has been offered more than the record two million rupees (about Dh87,000) a month which is reportedly being paid by Geo News to Najam Sethi, the leading late night broadcaster.
“I couldn’t believe how much they were prepared to offer. I won’t say by who or how much, but it was much more than what Sethi is making,” he laughed, holding court in the ground-floor of the Lal Haveli, a century-old red mansion hidden in the backstreets of Rawalpindi’s crowded Raja Bazaar.
Ahmed agreed that many political talk show hosts were misusing the power of the news channels. Yet his two spells as minister for information (or, as some would have it, chief government propagandist) taught him much about the often knowledgeable but always fickle nature of television audiences.
“Have no doubt,” he told me, “people can judge which anchor is biased and which is independent. Yet somehow Pakistanis like the aggressive attitude of the talk show hosts. In the US, the major networks earn from entertainment and lose money from current affairs. In Pakistan, it’s the other way round, because in our current affairs, there is entertainment in news programming that can’t be found in entertainment shows.”
Ahmed sees a link between political talk shows and Pakistani movies, whose box office success often depends on the degree of gory violence the hero inflicts upon villainous police officers, feudal landlords and factory owners, all of whom represent the oppressive ruling elite.
“I think we Pakistanis suffer from a bioengineering fault,” he said.
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In the three years since Dunya (or “World”) set up in Lahore, the channel has had a rough ride history, hiring and firing seven directors on the way to becoming Pakistan’s second-ranked cable news broadcaster.
On the day of my long-scheduled interview with Mian Aamir Mahmood, Dunya’s chief executive, that headcount of directors became eight.
Moments before I arrived, Syed Fahd Hussain, its most recent director, had just handed in his resignation. Perhaps that explained the tense silence in the channel’s offices. Speculation was swirling around Hussain’s next move (it now appears he is to host a political talk show on the rival channel, Samaa, from which Dunya itself had recently “poached” Meher Bokhari, Pakistan’s most popular female anchor).
At the office I was greeted by Faruk Lania, the channel’s creative director, who had seen it all before.
“oSrry dude, but you know what it’s like nowadays,” he laughed, shrugging apologetically. “The interview can be rescheduled, but let’s prioritise here. Laskhmi Chowk is down the road. How about some chikkad cholay?”
I eventually met Mahmood a few days later for our rescheduled interview in his office. We talked about the recent “mushroom growth” in the industry, which had seen the creation of thousands of jobs for two generations of college graduates who might otherwise have struggled to find a career.
This has created something of a “revolving door”, according to Mahmood, and that door has been spinning faster and faster in the past three years. Indeed, salaries of high-profile staff have quadrupled since 2008, when the transition to democracy lit the fuse under new channels, notably Dunya, Express and Samaa – respectively second, third and fourth in the rankings after the invincible Geo. With pay rising close to Middle East levels and channels investing ever more heavily in live broadcast equipment, which is expensive to acquire and operate, these recent start-ups are each estimated to have cost about $20 million (about Dh73.5 million) to launch and run for three years. All are struggling to generate revenues to cover operational costs.
Unusually open about the numbers, Mahmood said that Dunya, as well as the competing Samaa, costs about 75 million rupees (Dh3.25 million) a month to run, compared to about 100 million rupees for Geo.
“After three years, we are close to breaking even on operating costs,” he said. “But when Samaa is spending 70 to 75 million (rupees) a month, and earning just 20 to 25 million, who is bridging the gap? I should by now have known who is funding Samaa and why.” He doesn’t.
Mahmood suggested that lack of transparency, coupled with the leverage of the news channels, have made the industry attractive for investors with wider commercial and political interests to protect, and for whom a channel’s bottom line is not the primary incentive to invest.
“I can claim that I did not get into this business because of any wrongdoing,” he said (Mahmood was previously a politician). “I don’t have anything or any black money to hide. With every other media house, you can see they have invested because they have things to hide.”
Other recent media entrants, speaking privately, concede Mahmood’s point, but spin it by saying that their investments guard against “blackmail” by existing channels. Managers at Express News said their billionaire proprietor, Sultan Lakhani, had frequently cited allegedly slanted coverage of corruption charges brought against him in the 1990s as his motivation for investing heavily in a media house that now includes two news channels and as many newspapers.
Arm-twisting by “donation” seeking politicians are also believed to be behind plans by Mian Mansha, reputedly Pakistan’s richest man, to launch a news channel.
Such artificial inflows are further fuelling the overheating of Pakistan’s broadcast market, which is in deep financial trouble, and is overdue a painful contraction. Indeed, an increasingly prevalent symptom of the malaise is delayed payment of salaries – a symptom that Mr Sadiq, the Bespak president, said revealed that even former market leaders are broke.
“You are seeing networks delay salaries. If they carry on the way they have, many channels will die. People are already trying to sell non-operative licenses because the cost of business is so high,” he said.
“In 2011, the only thing on the channel proprietor’s mind is survival.”
Tom Hussain is a freelance journalist and broadcast consultant living in Islamabad
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arslan khalid on Sun, 26th Jun 2011 9:56 pm
i want to inform to the media of pakistan about the blast of qadafi police choki multan blast