Dark times
Rashed Rahman
I am feeling quite chuffed while writing these lines. I want
to express my thanks to the powers that be for forcing the organisers of the
Faiz Festival held in Alhamra Arts Council Lahore on November 16-18, 2018 to
ban my and two others’ participation in discussion panels. The two others are
my son, Dr Taimur Rahman, and Dr Ammar Ali Jan. The organisers could not defy
the dark hint that the festival as a whole may be at risk unless these
instructions were complied with. I have no beef with the festival organisers.
The Faiz family are old friends, almost family. The irony in this whole episode
is that all three banned participants belong to the Left. There is no
explanation as to their ‘sin’, which earned them the flattery of a ban from the
public space at a festival celebrating the great poet and lifelong icon and
doyen of the Left, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The mind fairly boggles what catastrophe
would have ensued if all three individuals were allowed to participate.
But why complain of this instance of strangling freedom of
expression alone? The issue is not of one or two individuals. It is far broader
and encompasses by now both the mainstream and social media.
The former has been emasculated by heavy leaning on
acceptable and unacceptable content, shrinking of government advertising by 70
percent and private by 50 percent. This has led to one TV channel closing down
and many others, big and small, teetering on the brink of collapse. Managements
have embarked on ‘right-sizing’ (which actually means downsizing), with
hundreds of journalists across the country being thrown out of their jobs and
many more on their way out or threatened with redundancy. Mainstream media
outlets are also complaining of the heavy but invisible hand of the censor.
Working journalists are out in protest at Press Clubs throughout the country
against limits on freedom of the media and the financial crunch that is losing,
and is likely to lose more, jobs in the industry.
Clearly, the mainstream media bubble in operation for the
last 16 years (since Musharraf allowed private 24-hour satellite TV channels)
has finally burst. As it is, the opening to private TV channels produced too
many for the size of a media market like Pakistan’s. The wisdom earlier was
that competition between these proliferating TV channels would eliminate some
on the principle of survival of the fittest in a market with marked
limitations. However, it is not competition but the twin menace of censorship
and financial difficulties that may produce the culling expected.
Newspapers were hit with a double whammy when private TV
channels proliferated. Their advertisement revenues suffered from diversion to
the arguably larger (captive) audience for TV. Some of the best print
journalists migrated to the greener pastures of TV, where they were joined by
new recruits, especially anchors with no previous experience in the field but
who nevertheless commanded huge salaries and perks. Not all of them are likely
to survive the purge. Many old media friends are being readied for the chopping
block.
Government and private advertising revenue having shrunk,
the mountain of arrears owed by the government to media houses dating back to
the tenure of previous governments also awaits clearance, with little but
government assurances of redress to show so far. In the print media, the
effects of the crisis have started showing in the form of reduction of pages,
closure and possible closure of smaller newspapers and even iconic magazines.
No good news is on the horizon so far.
If this indigenous crisis had not hit the media industry, it
may have continued in its complacent state without taking account of the
worldwide trends changing or threatening to change the media landscape. Print
and electronic media, magazines and newspapers are threatened by the rise of
the internet and social media. Young people today hardly get their news,
information and entertainment from TV or newspapers and magazines. They prefer
to remain glued to their computer or smart phone screens. In Pakistan, that
means roughly 65 percent of the population may no longer be customers of the
mainstream media. If the mainstream media is unable to reinvent itself in the
brave new digital world we live in, it is likely to become history eventually.
Debate on this problem has been inadequate the world over. Solutions, digital
and other, have yet to offer a convincing business model in consonance with the
new realities.
Mainstream media is not the only victim of the new age.
Books for most youth are passé. What these generations of tech-savvy young
people have failed to realize is that the internet and social media has a downside
too. Notwithstanding the revolution in communications wrought by these new
forms, they suffer from lack of gatekeepers, vetting of news and information, and
the anomaly of putting out both correct and incorrect, true and false news
without let or hindrance. This barrage of mixed up information can only cause
mental indigestion, i.e. confusion. The clarity that books supply, repositories
as they are of systematic knowledge, is in increasingly short supply.
In our case, the education system having been virtually
reduced to degree-awarding factories without heed to the intellectual
development of the system’s charges, i.e. young minds, leaves them vulnerable to
the saturated news and information cycle of the internet and social media
without the intellectual tools or capacity to sift right from wrong, true from
false. There are by now many instances of how social media lends itself to hate
speech, instigation to violence and other such anti-social trends. The answer
to this conundrum is lost in the din and pace of our times, which may rightly
be dubbed ‘The Age of Distraction’.
Revisiting the lines with which this column began, bans and
severe limitations on freedom of the media and expression lead to the
conclusion that we now live under a controlled democracy that the deep state
wishes to micro-manage in order to dominate the national narrative by means
subtle where possible, worse where necessary.
Dark times indeed.
rashed-rahman.blogspot.com
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