Western media and the Pakistani lobbyists

By Meera Jamal

Many years of having worked with Pakistani media, both as a reporter and a newsdesk editor, I had always assumed that being associated with the profession of journalism means that one has to state what truth is. While, many of those hailing from the field would agree with me, this is not always the case. Sometimes, it is the “newspaper policy” or your job that you can’t really afford to lose in a time when inflation and unemployment rate is the only thing in the country that is moving up.

However, we always imagine that whatever little of the Western media coverage we have is unbiased and never can have distorted fact. To shock of many, this is not always so. In a nutshell, it is not only the local media that succumbs to the government pressure but at times it is the western media as well that has to dance the moves told by the lord of the land.

Six months of a fellowship in the state run radio channel in Germany, which has its Urdu service as well, took all to bring me back to the ground. This radio had a magazine or special 10-minute section each day on women, inter-religious dialogue between Europe and Islam, culture, youth and another or civil society issues. All of this was placed in a 30 minute package with news and reports from its in-house or foreign correspondents.

One fine day, a handful of re-broadcasters (who no one knows for sure if actually rebroadcast that radio or its programme in Pakistan or not) turn up on a paid visit in Bonn, Germany and tell the administration to cut down its programme on women and civil society as the topics discussed in these magazines are “too critical”.

In their opinion, women magazine was a feminist magazine that portrayed “a wrong picture of Pakistan” while civil society magazine was “too critical” which they would not want to rebroadcast. For them sports programme (as if there weren’t enough being made in the country) and one on European countries and their good governance would interest them. Moreover, I am really disappointed to say that while making a women magazine on female politicians in Pakistan I was not allowed to say anything against the government or its policies in anyway.

Sadly enough, that this Western broadcaster had to kneel and to modify almost 80 percent of the programmes according to the wishes of these Pakistani rebroadcasters. This is the case also with all the media channels or broadcasters having transmission from abroad which is meant to cater to the Pakistani audience.

However, we should be somewhat happy that we are not alone in suffering this pain. In China, many western media channels were unplugged and even their websites were banned. Call it a business or what you may, these media channels have launched websites in the local language which provides the reader with material sanctioned by the government that is least to say mostly entertainment oriented materiel. Then we have Iran and Afghanistan has joined the league lately to as according to a report by CNN (in a report on May 1, 2009) Afghanistan is not anymore a free place for media (was it ever?). Iran has also been in news and termed as new USSR when it comes to having an iron hand, curbing the press freedom.

The media freedom always reflects the initiative by State to accept and correct if it makes mistakes. Media serves as its eyes, however, the new sensationalized media is not what I mean here. Many countries in the world have given the media the constitutional right to work freely. I only wish this could be said about our country as well. Someday perhaps.

(Meera Jamal lives in Germany)