The recent packaged milk saga brings to light two oft ignored cracks in Pakistans state-society relationship. The first of these pertains to medias independence, and the second pertains to its capacity.
Pakistans media may be independent when it comes to the government, its machinery or the political parties. Some media houses may have also grown some teeth to show albeit not bite the powers that be. However, hardly any media house is independent enough to criticise private sector businesses, notably the hands that feed such as banks, telecom, FMCGs and white goods producers.
It is beyond the scope of this column to suggest a prescription for turning the dynamic around but perhaps a series of public discussion forums might help. Here the NGOs, think tanks and other similar civil society institutions could take a lead and invite representatives from businesses, Pemra, media houses, advertising agencies and other stakeholders to at least get the conversation started.
Pakistans economy is largely consumption driven, and in the wake of growing middle class the clout of these consumers can be expected to grow sooner or later. The broad direction for media which plays a critical role in state-society relationship nexus should be to protect the general public interest, not only from the corruption or inefficiencies of the public sector but also from the corruption or inefficiencies of the private sector.
Independence, however, is just one end of the stick. The capacity, rather lack thereof, is another. It is easy to report or comment on he-said-she-said political noise; it is also easy to report, comment and critique on economy because there are several economic experts (even if many of those may be pseudo experts) out there.
But it is much more difficult to comment and critique on matters that involve science and technology such as the recent UHT milk saga or other food and health issues; or about faults in white goods, ICT, electronics etc; or apartment complexes and urban architecture; agriculture/livestock; and so on and so forth. Reporting, commenting and critiquing on these lines requires a certain set of expertise; an expertise that is found wanting in Pakistans media industry.
Some corporations try to fill that gap by holding one or two day field trips or training workshops. But they only show what they want to show for the purpose of corporate propaganda; they really have no real incentive to train journalists to a point where they come back and haunt them.
Building media capacity along these lines will take much time and patience. Remember that this is an industry where some mid-tier TV channels still send rookie journalists to the parliament to take sound bites of lawmakers whose names they dont even know of. Building the right kind of team to cover beats that require technical understanding will not happen overnight. Meanwhile, the growing middle class consumers also need to create demands on the media to protect their interest against private sector misendeavours.
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