Moral outrage is the one thing us Pakistanis are good at. No matter what race, religious, colour or creed you are, what your sexual preference is or what newspaper you subscribe to; claiming the moral high ground and then reducing it to a question of good versus evil, much in the same way General Zia framed his referendum question, is an art best known to the inhabitants of this land of the pure.
From dispensing swift, mob-style justice on the streets of Karachi or Sialkot to the date-busting of Maya Khan and now, most recently, the damnation and disbarring of the Lahore Bar Association for crimes against soft drinks. Moral outrage sells. It’s what drives newspapers and news channels 24/7. But there is no malice behind this move. They sell you this meat because they know that you want it. Admit it, you need to complain about petrol prices shooting up at the breakfast table; grumble about the lack of road planning on the way to work; whine about inflation during smoke breaks; bitch about politicians and their exorbitant lifestyles over lunch and, to top it off, argue with your wife over dinner about which talk show host asks the most venomous questions.
This is what we’ve been reduced to. Reactive beings, responding to moral stimuli with knee-jerk reactions. It’s learning by conditioning: we are programmed to ‘like’ certain things and ‘dislike’ others through exposure to such constructs as “the greater good”, or the “moral imperative” and even the “need of the hour”. Words such as these have a sense of urgency about them, they make you feel like you can be part of something bigger than yourself. They give you a false sense of purpose which is misleading and disingenuous. These morsels of manure are fed to us daily by reporters, TV show hosts, writers and columnists on the first hand and then regurgitated by social media hacks as the Lord’s good word.
There are just too many people out there who think they have the answer and that their answer is the ultimate truth, so help them God. They will go to any length to prove themselves right and even if they can’t, will leave the viewer stunned by triumphantly declaring ‘I will be vindicated by history’ after their complete and utter intellectual demolition.
But it’s not their fault. Most of these sermonisers are actors, paid to play a part. People who may be media professionals, but not journalists. The former tend to be greedy, unprincipled and the most vicious. The latter are vicious, but in a lazier way. A journalist is nothing if not thorough. He or she would comb a football field-sized issue with a fine tooth comb if it meant getting a juicy lead. The hungry media professional will go after the obvious, his or her attacks will be more personal rather than objective. Their own morality will shine through in all of their criticism and it will take an audience of a certain type to appreciate and identify with those views. So it is smart of them, then, to adopt the attitude that his most palatable to the bulk of our audience.
This tirade against abstract concepts should not confuse anyone: we’re still talking about the media here. Especially, the power to turn fiction into fact and the ability to harness notoriety as a means of making money make the media one of the most poisonous snakes in this forest. However, if guided by the right hands, the media can grow, become more mature and realise that it has a responsibility to be objective, even when confronted by a clear conflict of interest. But talk about regulation and then suddenly the proverbial has hit the fan and is plastered everywhere you turn.
Successive governments have tried to muzzle the media, so it is logical that it is wary of state control. However, with an utter lack of internal accountability, it is fast becoming, as one insider put it, “a very expensive insurance policy”. Special interests and lobbies come into play 99 percent of the time, which means that more often than not, what you see on TV or read in the newspaper is not ‘the truth’, but merely someone’s version of the truth. And all that talk about making the world a better place, I sincerely hope none of you believe that.
At the end of the day, principles, like cigarette lighters, are meant to be disposable. Ideologies change with the times and nothing is constant. Sensationalism is dangerous because it creates its own demand. It knows no boundaries and no one is immune to it. It is the ditch that our media has fallen into and now cannot get out.
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