EYE ON ETHICS

Mr. Alam is Lahore bureau chief of the news magazine The Herald.
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A middle-level official working at the Lahore office of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency has been suspended for ‘leaking’ a story to the media. A television reporter conned him to get the video film of a suicide attack on his agency’s local office on March 11, 2007 – an act that subsequently created huge broadcast waves across Pakistan and well beyond it, but also threatened the job of its ‘source’.

The reporter’s boss does not want to discuss the moral predicament the case poses: Is it ethical to get a news story even if it means endangering other people’s lives and livelihood? But he is quick to point out that at least a couple of other news channels in Pakistan did not acknowledge his channel as the source when they also ran the attack video some hours later.

Similar incidents are not uncommon in the world of cutthroat competition the electronic media in Pakistan has become of late. In the rush to break the news faster and earlier than the rest, television reporters seem to have precious little time to waste on bothering about the ethical implications of their assignments.

Only last month, Pakistan’s biggest private television channel ran a news alert about a huge explosion in a residential neighborhood in Lahore where scores of educational institutions are also located. Without bothering about the extreme anxiety that the alert caused to the parents whose children were present in the schools in that area at the time of the explosion, the channel removed the alert only after half an hour without explaining why it put it there in the first place.

The media coverage of the devastating 2005 earthquake also put under a bright spotlight all the ethical shortcomings of the nascent electronic media in the country. Overly sentimental, always dripping with death and destruction, television coverage showed how a natural disaster can become a boon for inexperienced journalists to try their hands at the biggest story of the day without worrying about the ethics of it.

During that tragedy, a famous talk show host was seen holding his microphone close to his mouth mumbling his sentimental commentary while the camera by his side was showing a dying woman. The gory images of the dead and the dying, believe most television journalists and some in the print as well, make good news regardless of the psychological impact that they may have on unsuspecting audiences including children.

The same mantra is repeating itself in the ongoing war on terror and the suicide attacks it has caused. Severed limbs, bodies dripping with blood, and wailing and moaning victims of this conflict daily get splashed on millions of television screens across Pakistan without even a semblance of prior warning or editorial control.

The editor of a Karachi-based English monthly magazine says these are grave ethical problems facing the media in Pakistan, but hardly anyone talks about them.

“There is no debate even within the media on what is right and what is wrong. So the question about having this debate with external players including the state and the civil society groups does not arise at all,” she says.

This absence of debate on ethics includes every single aspect of journalism in Pakistan. Take plagiarism. Rife and rampant, there seems to be no possible way of monitoring it let alone putting an end to it. Newspapers with international reputations and country-wide circulations indulge in it shamelessly and reporters and writers show little hesitation in giving their copy a boost by lifting chunks of well-written prose from anywhere.

Those who get caught are never even named and shamed, let alone punished. A young Karachi-based journalist known for having plagiarized others’ writings to shore up his own went into a brief period of hibernation before turning up as the senior assistant editor at a respected monthly magazine. His former editor says the silence of editors and corporate heads on the irresponsible behavior of their subordinates is letting some get away with murder, sometimes with a bonus.

“If we publish public apologies for plagiarized stories, maybe we can better manage this menace, though I am not sure if we can get rid of it completely,” says the editor.

One way the plagiarists work is to tell their stories through unnamed sources. In one case this ‘source’ turned out to be the copy editor himself after he discovered that the story he was editing had put something in the mouth of an official source that he had written in an editorial published only days earlier. In another case, a regular column carried by The Economist was generously used for a piece on taxation giving an unnamed ‘source’ the credit for information carried in it.

Worse still, some sources can be downright fake. “Sometimes reporters attribute something to an unnamed source though it’s their own opinion that they cannot otherwise include in the story,” says the chief reporter of an English language daily with daily experience of dealing with similar cases.

Many newspapers and media organizations, however, encourage their reporters and editors to be ‘opinionated’ in their reporting in order to promote some ‘agenda’. The front and op/ed pages of the vernacular and English newspapers of the biggest media group in Pakistan clearly show that people writing in those newspapers and their editors/managers are determined to have President Pervez Musharraf’s back sooner rather than later.

Even in those media groups where the push for Musharraf’s ouster is not that explicit, reporters/writers/editors are as opposed to him as anyone in the country. In their opposition to Musharraf, journalists report more in black and white than in grey when it comes to the issues that form today’s politics in Pakistan.

Certainly one reason for this anti-Musharraf bias in the media is how he badly he has treated media organizations and journalists during the last six months or so. But on issues like the restoration of the judges he sacked in November last, journalists seem to have lost all sense of proportion, campaigning – rather than reporting — as vigorously against the Musharraf regime as political parties and civil society groups. Any report, comment, editorial trying to point out the complexities involved in restoring the judges is considered a piece of journalism inspired by vested interests. If Musharraf had tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle debate on the issue, the journalists themselves have successfully drowned it out to the exclusion of their own colleagues.

Pressures from civil society haven’t helped, either. A Lahore-based court reporter was recently hackled by lawyers for describing their strike as ‘partially’ successful. In fact, lawyers are the latest entrants in the list of groups that have intimidated media persons for reporting on their exponents that they perceive as negative. The problem with the lawyers’ inclusion in this list is that it includes them among fascist political organizations, as well as religious fanatics and other extremists and criminal gangs. Given that the lawyers are running a movement for the rule of the law and the media have been overwhelmingly supporting their cause, coercing reporters to ‘toe’ the line is extremely worrying. It has led to the crowding out of authenticity and variety in favor of bias and confusion. Accuracy has given way to a pro-lawyers’ slant and clarity has been sacrificed for an obfuscation that does not allow a peep into the complexity of the movement and its objectives.

All said, the real pressure to disregard journalistic ethics comes from within. The material needs to run a household and the meager salaries that journalism jobs offer in Pakistan put journalists in the unenviable position of doing more with less. Many succumb to the temptation of making money on the side, flouting their responsibilities and ethical codes as journalists and thereby creating a conflict of interest where almost always morality and the media are the losers. Some of this money can come in the form of all paid-for visits in and out of country, expensive gifts, a monthly stipend or even as house rent or children’s school fees and its sources can be as varied as the government, non-government organizations, political parties, business houses and powerful individuals.

But the most explicit form of this ‘conflict of interest’ manifests itself in a rather crude manner.

“It is an open secret that many journalists in Pakistan hold down side jobs with the government, including the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence service),” is how the website of the World Press Institute puts it. Gainful affiliations with political parties are also not unknown. A leading English language columnist is a member of the parliament from the platform of a conservative, and a senior photographer working in Lahore has been given a middle level government job – along with his journalistic one – by the outgoing government as a reward for the services he continues to render the previous ruling party.

The fields of politics and journalism are both littered with journalists who could be politicians and politicians who want to be journalists. In fact, at least four editors and a television anchorperson can be found in the list of current and former ministers. Nobody knows how many others are ministers in the making while they work as journalists.

“Having ambitions and trying to realize them is human but doing it by compromising morality is abominable. Isn’t it the same thing we journalists condemn politicians for?” asks a senior editor.