(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
different news channels. More terrorism is attracting more coverage and more public attention on
Pakistani media.
Pakistanis are generating, processing, and consuming real-time information for the first time in the
history of the country. Rehmat says, “It’s almost if the virtual information darkness of the first 55
years of the country is now being avenged by a people whose hunger for information can’t be
easily satiated. Pakistan’s is the curious case of a country whose prime time” does not comprise of
entertainment aiming at relaxing the audience by “softening the sharp edges of their weary days
…, [but] of talk shows that focus on hard politics. Virtually all of the dozens of … [news and]
current affairs channels are running talk shows” from 7pm to 11pm with 9pm to 10pm news in
between (2010). These shows follow up on terrorist attacks. Rehmat says these channels have
invariably covered over 2,000 rumors and terrorist attacks in the past decade that were presented
as “breaking news” (2010) to sell blood, meeting the terrorist needs (Jamali, 2009). These news
are often speculative than attributive or authoritative (A. Niazi, personal communication, August
05, 2010), reflecting a general redundancy of training, research, responsibility, and ethics of the
journalists and the media groups. Such treatment is reflected in the coverage of most incidents
including Manawan and GHQ attacks, Benazir Bhutto’s murder, and the Lal Masjid operation.
The operation was conducted out of necessity because the militants, who took over Lal Masjid,
vowed to enforce a parallel judicial system in the capital based on their perceptions of the Islamic
laws and threatened to unleash a wave of suicide bombers if the government took any action to
counter it (Raza, 2007). According to “Three years,” “the Lal Masjid operation opened the
floodgates to militant attacks” throughout Pakistan, especially Lahore, “the capital of the liberal
elite” (2010). These attacks triggered a process of foreign disinvestment and the exodus of
foreigners that increased tremendously following the attacks that succeeded the assassination of
Benazir Bhutto. The media speculatively nominated the beneficiaries: Musharraf government and
Zardari as Bhutto’s assassins. The denials were again reported and speculatively challenged by
amateur and esteemed anchors of various media groups during news coverage and current affair
discussions of politics, assassins, and law and order situations. More news was generated as her
assassination triggered a number of riots, killing people, wrecking public and private buildings,
trains, and cars (“Bhutto,” 2007; “Bhutto’s Party,” 2007).
The car burning, properly wrecking, and human killing carry on as militancy, extremism, and
terrorism carry on limitlessly, attracting media and public attention in Pakistan. Rehmat says the
amateur, but information crazy media runs tickers of professional terrorism with watermark
showing the coverage of a public event as exclusive “a panicky description that is basically
repetitive, uninformative and stating of the obvious” (2010). The news story is invariably based on
4Ws: Where, Why, Who, What narrative whereby all except where is speculated. Rehmat
questions the ethics of where why who did what narrative because thrusting “the mike in the face
of a usually dazed person who was in the vicinity of the attack and has survived” only generates
caricatures (2010) of speculative information. Further, the reporter pushes the authorities, usually
a police officer, to put the responsibility for terrorism on any of the six forces: Taliban, Al-Qaeda,
anti-state elements, terrorists, hidden hands, and India (Rehmat, 2010). That too is ironically
speculative.
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