(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
Irony increases as “Pakistan: Code” points to some other aspects of “situations like explosions”
(2008). Two to three media people “reach emergency wards of hospitals. A doctor's priority in
such a situation is the patient,” but the queries of media crowd “affect administration of the
medical aid” to the injured (“Pakistan: Code”, 2008). Media groups ignore the space limitations
and medical aid administration issues by disturbing the staff and the patients in the emergency
wards of the hospitals just for the sake of going live before the competitor. Such attitudes reflect
that media groups have lesser interest in human issues and more interest in marketing the coverage
of terrorism as live and exclusive. The groups and their reporters and anchors amateurishly handle
terrorism and militancy. Their sole purpose is hooking audience to increase their worth. Marketing
gains primary significance, and ethics secondary. Their recording and broadcasting methodology
and selectivity of chunks cause, what Rehmat calls, content’s degeneration into tabloidization,
caricaturization, or oversimplification of terrorism (Rehmat, 2010) by Pakistani media.
Pakistani media groups, head-end owners, and anchors’ attitudes reflect negligence, immaturity,
and childish greed pertaining to selling a commodity named blood. Qadir (2009) questions the
ethics of media groups and professionals as collective policies emerge from individual acts.
Everyone wants to make money by selling commodity the news even if it is about blood, a
measure of everyone’s success whether the anchor or the channel. Jamali says “blood is a better
story to sell” than a social good, “one of the fundamental problems with Pakistani media” (2009).
The anchors exaggerate, misrepresent, intermix information with opinion, use “emotionallycharged
arguments” and “fancy words, metaphors, [and] proverbs … to report heavily on juicy
aspect of stories with shock value rather than reporting on more pressing issues to the general
public” (Jamali, 2009), highlighting redundancies of an amateur media.
Media being amateur lacks the ability to address or frame ethics to govern its own freedom; or, it
disbelieves in ethics as governing expression is not freedom to many minds. It can also be said
that electronic media is the extension of an unethical press that has existed for decades in Pakistan
and nurtured by governments and politicians on need basis. The unethical press needs to unlearn
its poor traditions that are passed on to the electronic media. The reporters, anchors, and groups
need to reconsider the differences among marketing, blackmailing, and ethics and responsibilities
of news media.
Media groups shall work together to tackle the permeation of inexperience through training
amateurs and press professionals in electronic media about values, sense of responsibility, and
ethics of broadcasting. The reporters and anchors shall avoid attitudes of general ignorance of
ethics of journalism and the connection between reporting and matters of national interest. The
reporters providing live coverage of terrorism shall neither ignore ethics of journalism nor the
need for self-censorship. However, the identification of the general redundancies shall not
undermine the long struggle of a Press that went through hardships to win freedom of media.
Qadir says media reports increasingly reflect “freedom and courage” since 1988; now, the
professionals need to struggle with themselves to objectively report a balanced case of the War on
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