Jounalism - A Profession of Hypocrites

THE ground has changed. So perhaps have the unwritten rules. In Pakistan today it is no longer government which chiefly influences or controls the press. The new censorship is altogether different and it comes in the form of special interests, big money and — dare one say it? — journalistic incompetence.Indeed, open denunciation of the president, of government and government policies has lost both charm and novelty. The word dictatorship has lost its sting. In fact, coming across the usual criticism, I suspect the reader is tempted to turn the page.This is not to say all is for the best, for in place of the old curbs and restrictions have arisen new ones, some more insidious than the controls we were familiar with.Advertising is the media’s oxygen. Regulating its supply, turning it up or down, is the new tool of control in the era of globalization. In this new environment, it is easier to criticize Musharraf or even the ISI, less easy to take on McDonald’s or KFC.I’ve often wondered why when five-star hotel managers greet important guests, the resulting pictures get splashed in even the better newspapers. Goes to show the clout these hotels have.Of American journalism in the first quarter of the last century the incomparable H. L. Mencken had this to say: “Most of the ills that continue to beset American journalism today, in truth, are not due to the rascality of owners nor even to the Kiwanian bombast of business managers, but simply and solely to the stupidity, cowardice and Philistinism of working newspaper men...There are reporters by the thousand who could not pass the entrance examination for Harvard or Tuskegee, or even Yale. It is this vast and militant ignorance, this widespread and fathomless prejudice against intelligence, that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar, and so generally disreputable.”With minor amendments this judgment is equally applicable to Pakistani journalism.

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