Daily Times

If ranting program anchors, foaming at the mouth with rage while trying to bog down adversaries with stabbing remarks, impress you or leave you awestruck at the moment, congratulations, you’re exactly the kind of viewership they’re doing their shows for. Without having to go digging deep into the tranquillity of this phenomenon of getting inspired by vilification, slanderous encounters, just know that you’ve been programmed to consume tirades, not effective narratives–anything contrary to denunciation would either go unnoticed or lack viewership hence out spacing intellectual niche even further. The dilemma is that we listen to reply, not to understand, which is the case with our media, tout ensemble. Anne Morrow Lindbergh hits the bull’s eye when she coins: “Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.”

Well, honestly, if news anchors with twerking loops in their sensational news-reading-rendition hit your right chords, kudos, you’re another value addition on the list of ‘target audience’—that the media outlets bend their backward over churning out. The provenance of such sensationalism hit the market almost one and a half decades ago when this form of news-anchoring started getting accepted as a cliché. This wouldn’t have been a bad induction, had the Pakistani news media industry known that sensitization only worked with specific news items, a scoop to be precise, and not with every single content. Hilarious as it may sound, but hearing an anchor finding a dram, through his voice, off a non-dramatic news item leave you reeling with disbelief!

Moreover, if infotainment media doesn’t cease to amaze you with its lewd puns and one-liners, leaving the audience convulsing into laughing stints, you’ve no idea how accurately they’ve poised their shotgun on your satirical instincts, which are now so immune to obscenity, salacity and vulgarism. You may have a bone to pick with me over this, yet I press that there is a fine line between satire and indecency, isn’t it? If on one hand, we advocate a society void of any gender discrimination, body shaming, misogyny and patriarchy, why would our dichotomous beings dare to watch content infested with squelches directing at people’s body shapes, one-liner picking at someone’s face cuts and unrefined humour disrespecting men and women?

The dilemma is that we listen to reply, not to understand, which is the case with our media, tout ensemble.

If the only sport, off 800+ globally, comes to light your screen is cricket, pat on the back, you’ve earned it for yourself. This is exactly what you desire to see, consume your screen time for, invest money into, buy tickets for, go frenzy towards and admire nonetheless.

I’d rather suggest reading out one of my pieces: https://dailytimes.com.pk/836593/hunting-for-an-olympic-champion-in-a-cricket-frenzied-country/

In this piece, I tried to shed some light on sports culture in Pakistan: “The fact of the matter is that we don’t want to spend a penny on anything other than “cricket.” Sports facilities have been confined to cricket clubs mostly as open grounds are either taken up by construction mafias or paved for routes. Besides some exceptions, Pakistan Sports Board and other “ill-functioning” federations are littering with crooks who claim hefty paychecks, damage the institutional integrity and flee away after heavy-duty marauding and plundering—the story of our institutions’ lives.” Let me do a bit of value-addition stating that our media has had its cherry-picking–having checked the pulses of public inclinations–which came out into giving 98 per cent coverage to cricket while leaving every single sport aside. What an absolute disaster! Imagine a nation acing the world with hockey skills now crumbling and dying on the table, down in the dumps!

As a nation, you must know that if a mediocre, a commoner or a bromide—to be precise–starts getting the lion’s share of screen-appearance, do intellectual shows with all the non-intellectuality; the ones to be lavished with enrolments should be you since that bromide is your reflection. He evokes the nation’s intellectual dip, on the whole, and which has fallen on the bottom rung already. If you’re trying to seek for sane familiar faces hitting national screens lately, probably no doughnut for you, since you’ve chocked them to death, professionally; your benchmarking for intellect-driven content has filtered them off and all you are left with is a declivity of rationalism and saneness.

If you don’t see a single good national song, patriotic vocal surfacing to hit the music industry for ages, hats off to you, you’ve devoured professionals those with souls. You are now pretty much complacent with middling composers, singers and artists. The outcome is not an anticlimax, it was about time! The most off-key is, the least off-screen is. In this day and age, people belt out pathetic renditions, hop around, and get bang for the bucks and booming, whereas the textbook singing goes in tatters. What that one national song do I not remember from my childhood and adolescence times, and what that one national song should I remember from the last decade that stirred the whole nation?

In addition, if you gauge someone’s success with soaring likes, proliferating subscriptions, augmenting following and growing fans, job well done. You’ve excavated ramblers on purpose, rather boozers, who’re selling you out the wine bottles in the guise of Turkey’s pine honey. Now, no matter if the alcohol is prohibited for selling to under-agers, health peril, immorality for faith-practitioners, they’d sell you out anyways–with no regrets, qualms and scruples. They’d keep on feeding you their content; left right and centre, until one day you fall apart only to be thrown in the same hole that you opened up once, a grave now, a black hole, strictly speaking!

If your lust knows no boundaries and keeps on exhausting your being on dark webs’ content, be thankful for the world of enchantment that you’ve fenced around yourselves because this is what you greeted with open arms.  You’re now sitting in the middle with the most vulnerable status, ready to be quashed by health perils, financial crises, deteriorated mental peace and stress challenges; if not today, sooner!

If you see a self-centred egoist, oo sorry an analyst, occupying screen every single day late in the evening with a plethora of fallacious red herring and trying to splash out the intellect produced at the humongous (area wise) backyard of his farmhouse, know that your audibility deserves a subjective opinion, not fact, and your eyeballs merit a self-serving perspective, not truth. You’re a trap leashed by a snare of sweet threads.

You blaming the media for what? If you blame the media industry for being mediocre, below par, subnormal and cheesy, know that you are to be blamed in the very first place. You’ve no one to hold responsible for all this, your choice your selection. There you go—mediocre media for mediocre people!

The writer is based in Islamabad. He can be reached at mbilal.isbpk@gmail.com, FB/mbilal.16