Daily Times

There is an age-old Urdu saying
that, if translated into my utterly poor English, would sound like this:“A false statement is devoid of any feet.” It is unable to move orrun. The simple meaning would be that a made-up statement without any substance cannot stand fact checks and will eventually be proven as such. The so-called independent Pakistani television channels, which were going to bring about a‘media revolution’ in this information age, have literally transformed into peddlers of gossip, innuendos and at times bald-faced lies.
The jokers, who pretend to be the opinion makers of this sorry nation, are minting money at the expense of rather naïve viewers. When the facts are presented to the contrary, the usual conspiracy defence is pleaded and this game keeps going on unabated. No shame and no regrets as long as suckers are there who buy into the new scoop that takes to the fore. In slang, what is termed as the taillights of a truck and everyone tends to follow the clueless and senseless driver on a dark highway. What is shamelessly called journalism is sensationalism without regard to any professional ethics or standards.
As mentioned last week, a political party of urban Sindh is the focus of attention for all the wrong reasons. Everyone and their mother-in-law in our media are out there to act like the ultimate loyalist of the king.So the wisest of them all, the gentleman who is famous for telling nothing but the solid truth,was once seen tweeting about that party. According to histweet, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks told him that the party in question had taken financial assistance from our arch-rivalneighbours. None other than Mr Assange himself thought of no one else besides the wisest owl of the Pakistani media. The story turned when someone tried to verify the veracity of the claims through the official WikiLeaks account on Twitter. The confirmation was to the contrary.
Speaking of the same party, if you do not miss the programmes of the famous duo consisting of the veteran journalist with cricketing leanings and his able sidekick, they had to add their two-bits as well. By the way, I have immense regard for the two as mostof their analysis is on the dot and often very credible. But in Punjabi there is a word called khach (silliness). In last week’s programme the senior journalist cum anchor who loves to converse in the aforementioned language as well, ended up with a khach. Both of them were discussing the alleged confessional statement of a senior leader of the party, who was interviewed by the London police department.
Oursenior journo vehemently asserted that the statement circulating on social media was true. I have zero exposure of journalism and,for that matter, of investigative journalism and I had tweeted that the statement with redactions looked highly questionable. In this case as well, when the London police department was contacted for verification, it clearly dismissed that document as inauthentic. There is no denying that theleader in question was interviewed by the police department but his interview and its contents are not public thus far.
The channel that both of these gentlemen grace their presence with was labelled a “traitor channel” by the holiest of the holy in this nation. In that particular instance, the channel was at fault by rushing to judgment without any credible proof, implicating a former spy chief in a murder attempt on one of its anchors. A young anchor who hosts a nightly programme on the same channel received a well-deserved drubbing by another member of the same party, who reminded him of how his channel made a blunder in that particular case and perhaps was about to repeat the same mistake by cornering and wrongly implying that his party is run by the financial support of our rivals.
I remember a couple of years ago when social media had a list of famous journos who had accepted lavish rewards from a real estate tycoon. Another so-called anchor who has a name very similar to our angry middle-aged political lightweight and flaunts his twitter handle with “anchor” as a suffix, flashed that list yet again. It turnsout that the famous real estate tycoon had to prove to none other than the apex court of this nation in the past that the infamous letter was fake. So, again, he had to tweet and remind everyone of the contents being fake.
I can go on and on and on. The bottom line is that, and this is the understanding of a non-journalist, the basic ethics or practice should be to verifystories from at least two other credible sources and vet themwith the seniors. Once blessings are obtained, only then the story should become public. But I think that is too much to ask from the wild,wild west of our very eastern, yet seemingly incapableof clear thinking media.

The writer is a Pakistani-US mortgage banker. He blogs at http://dasghar.blogspot.com and can be reached at dasghar@aol.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/dasghar