Daily Times

In Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show (1998), the hero, Truman Burbank, lives a normal life in an agreeable middle-class neighbourhood. He has a house, a job, a wife, a neatly settled routine — only none of it is real. From his infancy, Truman was brought to live on the set of a reality television show with 5,000 hidden cameras. All the people around him are paid actors. Since Truman does not know any of this, he believes in the illusion he has been fed all this time.
The film offers good commentary on the power of the media to manipulate reality; in this instance, to manufacture reality. In The Truman Show, the illusion created for the hero is a tangible fixture that resembles life so thoroughly that it replaces real life. The arrangement blurs the line between fiction and reality to the extent that it appropriates reality to fiction. In his essay, Simulcra and Simulation (published in 1981), French thinker Jean Baudrillard argued that when the distinction between illusion and reality collapses, a hyper reality comes into being. This hyper reality is a copy that has no original. Baudrillard went on to claim that we all lived in such a world. This is the world of CNN and Hollywood, and now also of Facebook and YouTube. We live in and courtesy of the screen, that of the television and that of the smartphone. Does that mean we are like Truman in a giant studio?
It is argued that the media manufactures reality. This it does by creating illusions that provide a mediated substitute for what is real. These substitutes work by reinforcing narratives that have been disseminated in the public. The imagery generated by the television screen is very potent. It can reinforce old ideas or plant new ones. In some instances, politics, Hollywood and television media work in collusion to give us a mediated reality. It is a reality they want us to believe in.
Consider the case of US commando operations in foreign countries for instance. In October 1993, a US team of special forces landed in Somalia, ostensibly, for a good cause: to prevent a militant politician from seizing power. Things did not go as planned and a dozen or so Americans and 1,500 to 3,000 Somalis died. While the news of the event, along with narrative forming ‘expert’ analysis and commentary, was telecast by CNN, Fox, the BBC and the like, the event was followed by documentaries that utilised computer graphics and actual footage of the macabre event in creating a retelling of the raid. These shows were telecast on infotainment channels. Then there was the Hollywood production Black Hawk Down (2001). Interestingly, US politicians like Donald Rumsfeld went public appreciating the movie for its “realistic” portrayal of the sacrifices of American soldiers who participated in the raid. In 2003, there was another documentary, The True Story of Blackhawk Down, telecast on Nat Geo and the History Channel. It showed ‘real’ footage of the raid to prove that the movie Black Hawk Down was true to actual events.
A discussion on the merits of the operation or on its legality lies beyond the scope of this writing. What is significant here is the way media outlets — news networks, infotainment channels and Hollywood — manufactured a version of events. First, there was a political decision in favour of military intervention in a foreign country. The civilian death toll of the operation reached a staggering number. There was utter chaos. However, the only pictures we saw of the event were the ones shown on CNN and the like. Hollywood reinforced the narrative and then Nat Geo and History Channel lent credence to the Hollywood version. What really happened and why it happened does not really matter. As Baudrillard would have said, there is no recourse to reality anymore.
In the Pakistani context, how far does the media go in manufacturing reality? Here, the idea that the media manipulates reality entered public discourse in the days of the PTI’s dharna (sit-in). The coverage given to the event by different television channels was discussed to weed out the political machinations of media conglomerates. For the first time people talked about camera angles and camera shots executed to inflate the number of protesters. But the issue was not pressed and debates petered out in the media’s internecine wars. Very little is discussed about how the local media manipulates its viewers and how domestic and foreign policy narratives are formed. The NA-122 and local bodies’ elections could provide an interesting case for analysis. To what extent does media coverage influence the outcome of an election? Television channels can generate electoral fervour. Like Basant in Lahore or the Shab-e-Barat fireworks of yesteryears, television media can make a festival out of elections. And they do. But this coverage in not always nuanced. Two media powerhouses, one allegedly pro-establishment, the other not so much, had us believe their team (the PTI or PLM-N) had a comfortable lead over the other.
Is it possible to resist the media’s machinations? For starters, there is the old cliché: “Do not believe everything you see on television.” Never before has it been so important to have independent, honest voices and sources of information. If there are those hell bent on spreading disinformation, there must also always be saner voices and nuanced points of view. Regardless of the source, it is the duty of responsible citizens to verify the information being given to them. One way of going about this is to look for alternate points of view and that is just a Google click away. Google itself is part of the hyper reality but the sheer size and relative freedom to upload information on the internet means that the most effective tool of the virtual world can be used to upload some reality too.
But then are we ready to come out of the bubbles that we live in? There is always a certain comfort in living in illusions, especially collective ones. Since we are so used to these illusions, we might actually be scared of breaking free. Breaking free does not mean shutting oneself out from television, Twitter and YouTube but it does mean taking all of these for what it is they represent: a contrived picture of the world that cannot and should not be allowed to appropriate the real world.
In Weir’s film, Truman begins to suspect the reality of his world. Eventually, he discovers the studio, the set and an exit door. But before he can leave, the show’s director launches one last salvo at him. Truman knows nothing of the world outside the studio. The world is unpredictable; it is real but it also has disasters, loss and grief. This is where Truman has to face an important question. It is the same question we have to face. Are we ready to face the void that has been created because the distinction between fact and fiction has collapsed? Truman decides to leave the studio and find out for himself.

The writer is a lecturer in English at Government College University, Lahore