A bubble of controversies – The Media

Social media news-feed is cluttered with various comics, assertions, tweets and allegations upraised towards an event that has recently happened in Pakistan and has actually made the people raise questions on the credibility of media. How did this happen? Who did it? Why did this happen?

“Because Veena Malik is busy with some projects this time so someone else had to take charge and create some spicy story,” said one of my friends. Absolutely! I skimmed through various blogs, notes and write-ups published on the internet regarding this issue and somebody quoted that media and journalism is not what is happening in our part of world. Invading someone’s privacy under the banner of educating them is certainly not acceptable in the domain of media.

My comment in this respect is that we have become habitual of watching spicy sensationalism every time on the news and talk shows. Every other day, there’s some story coming up, it is debated upon, exaggerated to the extent that the originality of the case is ripped apart, then after some time, people forget about it until some new matchstick is lit.

I was pleased to some extent when I saw some upright and credible people showing up in the morning show, Bakhabar Savera by Asma Mustafa Khan, to give their assessments. Delighted, because I saw someone actually describing it from the perspective as it should have been so that no such incident happens again rather than simply accusing that one particular host for whatever reason on Earth that made her do that. Also, the presence of prominent personalities like Hasan Nisar, Mazhar Abbas, and the actor Mahmood Ahmed, verified its intensity.

I agree to a few points that were discussed in Bakhabar Savera and would want to highlight them. Number one, power is to be used, not abused. Chasing someone in parks, interrogating and humiliating them, and then feeling proud about the fact that you have done something socially responsible is being purely judgmental and equivalent to daydreaming, basically. No one on Earth, other than God and law, has the right to judge anybody’s actions. The media’s duty is only to inform and entertain us within the limits that the law has stated. Simple.

Number two, who defines the limits? We humans are called the ‘Ashraf ul Makhlooqat’. Why? Because we have a mind which defines the pros and cons of every action we perform and we have this conscience inside us. These two basic things define the limit primarily. Any action or deed questioned by your conscience as ‘something not right’ draws the limit. Envisioning this statement in the light of the recent incident, the point to ponder upon is that, what would you have done if somebody would have interrogated you in some public place asking for your nikahnama?

The last point I liked about the discussion in Bakhabar Savera was the idea of considering media as a ‘business’. As far as I perceive it, media is a responsibility, not a business. As I mentioned above, its duty is to inform and to entertain the masses and not to exploit them. However, nowadays, it is going way ahead to get ratings and business with the only aim of earning money and making their channel stand out of the rest. So, when your core objective is to make money and not to care for your stakeholders, this is where you end up being – in an alien world, where that ‘controversial’ story has taken that morning show to.