It's Basic Decency, Stupid

I was going to post my outrage over the depths of tabloid-y sleazebaggery that The News sunk to today but blogger Tazeen has already said all that needed to be said, so you should go over and read her post. I concur completely.

Not only did the reporter, editors and owners of The News break all norms of professional journalistic ethics and the right to privacy, they have also abetted a truly despicable hospital administrator in flouting a sacred oath of patient confidentiality and exposed a woman to prosecution from odious Zia-era Hudood laws that they claim to have been in the vanguard of the fight against. They should be ashamed of themselves.

We have in the past protested strongly when sleazy personal and defamatory stories against the Jang Group CEO Mir Shakilur Rahman were publicised on the floor of the Sindh Assembly and in the media. For someone who has borne the brunt of such unethical invasion of personal privacy, it boggles the mind that he would allow his newspaper to perpetrate the same to someone else. The owner of the Jang Group and the editors of The News should also be aware that if they think any of this flouting of basic ethics and decency is justified in any way because their target is an often-mocked celebrity, in the future someone who wishes to humiliate them might decide that they or their families are fair game as well. No one is free of skeletons in their personal closets.

Siachen Tragedy: Prioritizing the News

This is a post about the heart-rending tragedy that struck on the Siachen Glacier early Saturday morning, which has buried - and in all likely probability killed - at least 135 people in one of the biggest avalanches ever to strike Pakistan. The latest estimates say all 124 soldiers stationed at the battalion headquarters in the Gayari sector and some 11-14 civilian support staff are now buried somewhere underneath the avalanche of snow, stone and dirt, said to be over-a-kilometre-wide and up to 80 feet deep.

But this post is not about the futility of maintaining armed forces in such inhospitable terrain (where more soldiers have died from the natural conditions than actual fighting), nor about the ridiculous expenditure this quarter-of-a-century-long deployment imposes on both Pakistan and India whose people still die from hunger, malnutrition, lack of access to clean water and easily treatable diseases. It could well be, but that's become almost a cliche and enough commentators will be focusing on just that. No, I want to focus on the shocking way this tragedy was covered by Pakistan's electronic media.

The following are the headlines from the 9pm bulletin on Geo News from Saturday 7th April 2012. Notice something?




As you can see, the news item about more than 100 Pakistanis having possibly perished was tucked away in fourth priority, behind the usual war of words between the PPP and the PMLN, the preps in India for President Zardari's 'private' visit to the Ajmer shrine and COAS Gen Kayani's banal statement about not letting counter-insurgency operations detract from 'normal' war planning. Sandwiched between these stories and other  news items about a motorbike stunt show, a transvestite wedding and 'Arab' dance on Karachi's food street, you could be almost forgiven for thinking the death of so many citizens of Pakistan was no big deal.

Keep in mind that the avalanche took place at 6 am on Saturday morning. I first saw the news in the 2 pm bulletin (it could have appeared earlier, I am not sure). And I remember feeling incredulous that even then the story was dealt with in such cavalier fashion. The entire day, it never received any higher priority than the third, fourth or fifth top story. It was only at 10.30 pm, when the armed forces' Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) department issued a statement detailing the specifics of the catastrophe that, suddenly, the news was turned into 'Breaking News' and finally entered the top slot of news bulletins.

Now, in any country in the world, such a natural disaster, especially one in which over 100 of its citizens had perished or even been trapped, would have or should have made the top story. Forget issues of nationalism, this would be a top story for any news media anywhere in the world. For a media that thrives on human interest stories, the idea that such a huge number of people were buried alive under a wall of snow inherently calls out for top billing. The number of lives directly touched by this tragedy - from family, relations, friends - in itself numbers in the tens of thousands. All the next day's papers, quite rightly, gave the story the main headline.

So what happened with Pakistan's television channels? (Although I have chosen to highlight Geo News here as the largest, by far, of the private media channels, I am told the other channels were similar in their handling of the story.) The only two possibilities are that either the news editors are completely incompetent in their judgement of news-worthiness, or that it was, more likely, pressure from the army that forced them to play down the story the whole day. And I will submit that in the case of the latter, the news editors and their channel's owners have displayed that they are equally incompetent in their judgement.

It is important to keep in mind a couple of things. One, that it was not that the story had not reached the news channels because of the remote location; they were aware of the parameters of the disaster at least by 2pm and were running the story, just not in the spot it deserved. Two, that it is highly, highly improbable that channels that run even the most mundane localized political and crime stories ad nauseam in their bulletins suddenly discovered the value of not 'sensationalizing' such a genuinely 'big' story. Even the argument that time was needed to inform the families of the potential victims does not hold any weight, since anyone whose loved one was deployed at Siachen would already have become aware of the disaster from the news that was running through the day. The only thing the down-playing of the news might have achieved is their resentment that their loved ones' lives were not worth more serious concern.

If channel heads and news editors cannot turn down the silly and unwarranted pressure of the army (if indeed it was this that decided the news priority and not simple incompetence) to play down what is, for any half-wit journalist, a blatantly obvious major story, if they really cannot stand up for their own news sense on such a non-controversial matter, they really should stop tooting the horn about themselves as the "independent media."

Wedding Or Not, The Jang Group Gets Served

We had internally decided to steer clear of commenting on the rumours circulating on the internet - apparently for a few months now though they seem to have got more notice in the last few days - about President Asif Zardari's alleged secret marriage to a Pakistani-American physician Dr. Tanveer Zamani. The reasons for this were rather simple: in the absence of any credible evidence (even the blogs asserting this information admitted that they had no real evidence and were basing their claims on hearsay), any comment would be mere speculation and not a lot different from tabloid sleaze.

Secondly, there's a tricky line here between 'public interest' and using someone's entirely private life to somehow discredit them in the eyes of some. Although it can be argued that Zardari re-marrying could impact national politics and thus be of 'public interest', until that information is confirmed, it remains within the realm of the millions of unverified rumours circulating in cyberspace that don't necessarily deserve the attention of responsible media. To be absolutely truthful, we were wary also of this being some sort of orchestrated smear campaign, and since we could neither confirm or deny the rumours, we thought it best to not to indulge in wild speculation.

Of course, no such qualms for The News' Group Editor Shaheen Sehbai, who decided to append his name to a curiously full-of-innuendo-but-short-of-anything-definite story in the paper today (an Urdu version also appeared in Jang). Most of it was lifted straight from the questionable blogs (all of which carry the same story in the same words and which Pakistan Media Watch has also commented on) but his one value addition was that he spoke to the lady in question, who bizarrely remained non-committal in her answers. Of course, with the story appearing in a mainstream publication, this has only opened the floodgates to further speculation, now with other blogs and even international news agencies feeling it kosher to jump on to the bandwagon.

We still do not have any credible evidence either way and do not wish to be drawn to comment on the authenticity of the story. All we have been able to glean about Dr. Zamani's background is that she joined one of the three factions of the terribly fractured Pakistan People's Party in the US in 2009, that she quite obviously has tried to model her appearance on the late Benazir Bhutto and is reputed to be a bit of an attention-seeker.

However, what we can confirm is that Dr. Tanveer Zamani has sent the following email directly to the press, from her own email address, in response to Sehbai's story:

"I have never met President Zardari and the only reason I have refrained from commenting on an internet hoax involving me is because I deemed it beneath my dignity to respond to such a hoax. Bloggers and journalists do not have the right to make up stories and disrupt the lives of people. I explicitly and clearly deny being married or being subject to a proposal or notion of being married to the Pakistani President, whom I hold in high esteem."

We can also confirm through our sources that the Jang Group has been served a legal notice by the "Bhutto-Zardari" family through their representative Mark Siegel and the legal firm of LockeLordBissell&Liddell. The notice demands of the Jang Group to immediately publish a "retraction and apology" for the "libelous" article, which it terms based on "a complete lie that was fostered by an internet hoax." The letter states:

"Publication of such a non-sourced fabrication was not only reckless, it was malicious. President Zardari has never met Dr. Zamani, and Dr. Zamani has confirmed such to Mr. Siegel."

The notice further says that in case such a retraction and apology is not immediately published, legal action will be initiated...

"...for libel, malicious publication and intentional infliction of emotional distress in all jurisdictions where your newspaper is published, as well as any jurisdiction in which your paper has assets. This lawsuit will seek in excess of $100 million, which the Bhutto-Zardari family would donate to the victims of the 2010 floods in Pakistan."

A copy of the legal notice with some initial mistakes (Shaheen Sehbai's name, his email address, date of publication of the story, supposedly subsequently corrected) is reproduced below:

The legal notice to the Jang Group

Readers may draw their conclusions whether journalistic ethics demanded that Shaheen Sehbai and the Jang Group gather some more evidence before publishing the story. It would do well to recall that under libel laws, the defence that you are merely repeating what has been said by someone else or published elsewhere, is no defence at all.

Of Media Ethics and Access

So I've still been thinking about the whole General Stanley McChrystal affair. No, not about the vibrancy of American democracy that has the confidence to remove a celebrated (and some believed indispensible) soldier getting too big for his britches (they've done it before). No, not even about what it means for the US' Afghanistan adventure that seems best to be characterized as floundering. No, what I have been thinking about is the whole rigmarole around the fact that it was a freelance contributor writing in a non-mainstream publication (at least in the sense of it not being one of the foremost purveyors of political coverage in the US) that managed to pull off the biggest scoop of the year. And its parallels for the media in Pakistan.

If you haven't followed the whole media circus after the story broke in Rolling Stone, briefly, Michael Hastings the freelancer whose reporting of McChrystal's and his aides' impertinent remarks about the American civilian leadership and civilian control over the armed forces led to the general's fall, was vilified by some big names within the mainstream media. Among them New York Times pundit David Brooks and CBS News' Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan. Their contention, in a nutshell, was that he had 1) broken an unspoken code of conduct whereby embarrassing things about the American military were never published / broadcast and 2) he had had the freedom to report such things because he was only doing a one-off report and was not looking to gain repeated access to such high level operatives. 

Of course such mealy mouthedness has received a suitable backlash from other people within the American media as well. You can read a from-the-gut visceral response to Lara Logan by Matt Taibi in Rolling Stone (appropriately titled "Lara Logan, You Suck") as well as Amy Davidson's  defence of Matt Taibi's rant here in the The New Yorker. But perhaps the most telling of all was this op-ed by Frank Rich in the New York Times titled "The 36 Hours That Shook Washington" which encapsulated the issue at the heart of the media flap:

"There were few laughs in the 36 hours of tumult, but Jon Stewart captured them with a montage of cable-news talking heads expressing repeated shock that an interloper from a rock ’n’ roll magazine could gain access to the war command and induce it to speak with self-immolating candor. Politico theorized that Hastings had pulled off his impertinent coup because he was a freelance journalist rather than a beat reporter, and so could risk “burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.”

 

That sentence was edited out of the article — in a routine updating, said Politico — after the blogger Andrew Sullivan highlighted it as a devastating indictment of a Washington media elite too cozy with and protective of its sources to report the unvarnished news. In any event, Politico had the big picture right. It’s the Hastings-esque outsiders with no fear of burning bridges who have often uncovered the epochal stories missed by those with high-level access. Woodward and Bernstein were young local reporters, nowhere near the White House beat, when they cracked Watergate. Seymour Hersh was a freelancer when he broke My Lai. It was uncelebrated reporters in Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau, not journalistic stars courted by Scooter and Wolfowitz, who mined low-level agency hands to challenge the “slam-dunk” W.M.D. intelligence in the run-up to Iraq."

The more I think about it, the more I believe there are some real lessons to be learnt from this. Now, the first part of Hastings' denigrators' contentions against him probably tells you more about the mindset of the mainstream US media (and a certain sort of "patriotic" journalist anywhere) than anything else. But specifically it is the latter contention that Pakistani journalists might do well to think about, since it encompasses even sincere, generally truthful journalists: the desire - in the paraphrased words of Politico - "not to burn bridges" with important contacts. How many of us compromise on the truth to preserve our "access" to the corridors of power?

Certainly, in a country such as Pakistan where information - even straightforward information - is difficult to get from official sources, reporters must mine contacts within power. But where exactly does one draw the line? Particularly if one's own source could be undermined through the information one has picked up. Of course, the issue of media owners' vested interests in certain centres of power is also inextricably intertwined with this issue. Food for thought.