Earlier this week the national chapter of Transparency International organised a youth convention on governance, where one of the subjects of discussion was role of media in curbing corruption. This is a fashionable subject among media persons who tout the important role the media plays in curbing corruption. But today, let’s take a contrarian’s view and talk about the limits of media in curbing corruption in Pakistan.
Corruption is not only financial corruption. It includes several aspects of non-financial corruption, such as public-school teachers who sign their attendance sheets and head off to another day time job. With that in mind let’s take a step and take a look at the ‘role of media’ in Pakistan, which we contend is limited and therefore the role of media in curbing corruption is limited.
At the risk of simplification, the media’s job is to mediate between various stakeholders of a society; individual citizens, governments, businesses, and the third sector (i.e. NGO, think tanks and civil society organisations). This mediation may be done through informing, through asking tough questions, advocacy, done by means of filing press releases, op-eds, scoops and long form investigative pieces, news bulletins, talk shows and so forth.
But all this mediation business in Pakistan has an urban bias. Economic incentives of media organisations and the rating structure, especially in the case of the most penetrating electronic media, are so structured that the subjects they touch upon are mostly if not entirely urban; i.e. they focus on problems and solutions that affect the lives of urban citizens. This a serious limitation of media, because rural population is still between 40-60 percent depending upon whose estimates you prefer and leaving their issues out of the discourse effectively means that media role in curbing corruption is also limited by its very scope of coverage.
Another missing link in media is that it focuses mostly on national issues. While there is no publicly available empirical study on this, suffice to say that even regional channels and newspapers focus mostly on national issues – their talk shows or op-eds and their news section have a national bias to it. Since the 18th amendment important areas of governance including heath, education, police, water, housing and so forth are provincial subjects, and by not focusing on provincial subjects the media is seriously limiting its own role in curbing corruption.
The third missing link is the media’s excess focus on mediation between the government and the citizens. It does not mediate between other stakeholders of society; at least not as effectively. When it comes to businesses, the media hardly even takes the names of the corporations involved in any bad practice, because they don’t want to bite that feeds. Clearly, the government does not have a monopoly on corruption. If the media does not mediate between other clusters of society, then that too limits its role in curbing corruption.
In addition to the limiting scope of media’s coverage in Pakistan, the weak capacity of the media also contributes to media’s weak role in curbing corruption. Jog down the memory lane and take a look at media’s coverage on corruption, and you will most likely arrive at the following conclusion: media’s corruption related coverage – news or views – are reactive, post fact, post mortem reporting and analysis, rather than being preventive.
That’s not really curbing corruption; that’s only unearthing it. While it is impossible to check all corruption before it happens, a lot of corruption can be checked if media has sufficiently trained staff or subject matter specialists who understand the complications of legal and policy framework, the rules of business, procedures and so forth and highlight the lacunas the very presence of which facilitate corruption of various kinds.
A lot of corruption can be checked by a water-tight inter-locking mechanism of check and balance that should exist within the legal and policy framework in question. Since the media spends less time in publicly debating those aspects, it ends up filing a scoop after a corrupt person has already capitalised on a legal or policy lacuna. And then the media goats about ‘curbing corruption’.
Lastly, the supply of transparency will not curb corruption alone. Transparency has to be demanded as well. While every citizen is not expected to create this demand, business associations and chambers, various centres of study at universities, student body associations, and civil society organisations can use their collective power and resources to create an effective demand for transparency. Without a demand for transparency from the wider public at large, media’s role in ensuring transparency and accountability to help curb corruption will remain fairly limited.
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