Lessons from Maya Khan

I thought about simply updating the previous post but decided that this deserved a separate entry.

So, after much pressure from social media, activists, oped writers and blogs as well as the odd well-deserved editorial in mainstream papers, it seems the message did finally get through to Samaa TV's management. Maya Khan and her team have been fired by Samaa and her programme stopped. The following is the letter from Samaa CEO Zafar Siddiqi which was shared with the media:

Dear All
Your feedback is appreciated. As a responsible corporate citizen, Samaa TV did what was required under the circumstances. We do not and have not in the past or intend to in the future to take our viewership or reporting requirements without the seriousness that they deserve. 

You would appreciate that as an organisation with a functioning management team, we had to conduct certain legal requirements over the past week and internal review processes (which are operational in nature) before procedding further. 

As a result of which I can inform you: 

We asked Maya to apologise unconditionally which she did not.
The CEO asked her to do that on Friday which she refused. 

As a result of which the following will be put in place on Monday, Jan 30th: 

Maya and her team will receive termination notices.
Her show is being stopped from Monday morning. 

Our deeds and actions taken since this episode occured are there for the record and hope this will settle issues as far as the station is concerned. 

A lot has been written about the race for ratings. Well, we do [not] absolve such behaviour irrespective of ratings that the show was getting. 

With best regards and thank you for your understanding. 

Zafar Siddiqi
Chairman CNBC Arabiya
Chairman CNBC Africa
President CNBC Pakistan

There are a couple of things to gather from this unfortunate episode:

1. Social pressure works! While Mr Siddiqi must be fully appreciated for being willing to listen to and understand the voices of outrage and for taking swift action, none of this would have been possible without the pressure that built up over the issue. What made the pressure effective was the multi-pronged strategy which involved not just raising the issue with PEMRA, but also writing directly to the Samaa TV management, the petitions and threats of protest as well as the momentum that organizing a consensus provided via Twitter and Facebook and various oped pieces in mainstream papers. It was this momentum that forced the mainstream to raise the issue even in editorials. Let no one doubt the power of a group of people to change things.

2. The importance of thoughtful media management. Even as Samaa quickly issued a clear apology once the matter achieved notoriety, the issue might have been 'handled' with less drastic results had Ms Maya Khan not issued a half-hearted mea culpa (while grinning) at the same time which only made people question Samaa's seemingly sincere apology. On top of it all, her programme's producer, one Sohail Zaidi, was quoted by the BBC defiantly stating that he was "not responsible to anyone but himself." Ms Khan and Mr Zaidi ended up being responsible for making their own cases worse.

3. The importance of perspective and proportion. Some activists and social media types did get carried away in their anger. To be sure, Maya Khan and her unashamed cohorts did infringe on other peoples' privacy and harrass them. But posting details and pictures of Maya Khan's personal life or the personal cell phone numbers of Samaa TV management on public forums was certainly not the way to go. Thankfully, there were calmer heads within activists who immediately called out their fellow activists on the irony of responding to someone's egregious actions by acting in the same coin.

4. Need for ongoing media monitoring. One of the main reasons this blog was set up was because we felt the need for such monitoring at a time when media was booming in Pakistan and there were precious few willing to raise a voice against well-funded media houses. Obviously, however, we neither have the resources to monitor all of the media nor any official mandate to take action on issues we come across. All we can do is play a part in publicising issues as we see them. But what is really needed is for an independent body - hopefully comprising of civil society experts in the media - to oversee public complaints. PEMRA has the official authority to take action but is often criticised variously for being either overly bureaucratic, under the government's thumb (and thus partial), or too beholden to the large corporate media houses. It would be in PEMRA's interests to help set up an independent body, along the lines of the UK's Offcom, to help it monitor content and handle public complaints. This would not only reduce pressure on PEMRA but provide its decisions with the stamp of fairness and consensus it needs.

Hopefully, some of these lessons will be learnt.