Forget Urdu or English. We now have a new lingua franca: the media.
Everyone in Pakistan is now speaking the language of the media. Talking to the media, at the media, and through the media is now the trend that all are following. Institutions, officials, organizations, terrorists, you name it and they are crafting their message in media terms.
That’s how they get heard. And understood.
The exalted judges once spoke through their judgments. Not anymore. Now they prefer speaking through tickers and headlines. The army chiefs once spoke through the Triple One Brigade. Not anymore. Now they speak through carefully drafted press releases which take on a life of their own once they hit the airwaves. The heckling politicians once spoke through their parliamentary speeches. Not any more. They rave and rant on talk shows to get their message across to their voters.
Pakistani media today is Tiananmen Square, Hyde Park and the Roman Coliseum rolled into one. This is where it all happens. The idiot box is not as idiotic as it once was.
That’s the good news. The bad news however, is that this nascent monolith is also open to manipulation.
Such manipulation is a staple of mature democracies. “Media management” as the term goes, is now nothing less than a science. Media specialists in government, political parties and other organizations learn the inner workings of the media in order to use it for their own hands. The good ones get the results, often without the media realizing it has been used.
When U.S. President Ronald Reagan returned from a successful trip from the Soviet Union after meeting his counterpart Gorbachev, the landing of his Airforce One aircraft was timed just before the prime time evening news bulletins to ensure top headline and maximum coverage.
Similarly, when U.S. presidents hold news conferences, they have in front of them the seating chart of reporters with their names. This way the president can call out reporters by name when they raise their hand for a question. The aim is to make the president look like a ‘regular guy’.
In Pakistan, too, institutions and political parties are honing their media-savvy skills. The smarter media managers are in tune with the news cycle and familiar with the workings of channels and their key staff. These spin doctors are still far behind their western counterparts in understanding how to channelize the power of the media for their purposes, but at a basic level, they have started playing the media.
Manipulation can start right from the top. Channel owners are susceptible to such conscious and subconscious manipulation because of their business interests. Further down, channel heads, anchors, reporters and other staff are also vulnerable to individual or collective pressures. Content is highlighted or killed often times through such measures. This however, is the crudest form of manipulation.
The more subtle ones revolve around timing, selective leaks, news ‘feelers’ and trial balloons and injecting carefully planned unsubstantiated rumours into the news cycle. All this banks on a clever recognition that intense competition between channels allows for lesser journalistic scrutiny and a diluted editorial judgment on part of news managers. The race for ratings compels journalists to lap up content that has shock value. Often times, accuracy and context become a casualty.
A newsmaker, for example, would know that a carefully timed vague but meaningful remark that is open to varying interpretations will be immediately lapped up by the media.
Meaning will be forced upon the remark and if the timing is right, it will spin its way on to the headlines and then into prime time talk shows that depend on the headlines for their content.
So once an item makes it to the top of the news, it starts to generate heat. A delicately calibrated sound byte, an off-the-record tip substantiating the sound byte and a vague sounding phono by a responsible person can inflate the item and make it into a discussion topic.
A smart spin doctor knows the exact weaknesses of the media and how to plug in content where it will be sucked into the news cycle. Weak editorial controls within channels make the job of the spin doctor much easier than it should be.
Let us look at some examples: Chief Justice of Pakistan is one of the biggest newsmakers in the country. Whatever he says, or does, makes automatic headlines. Even on routine matters, that have little or no news value, his words are given maximum media exposure. No surprise then that he speaks to the media quite frequently outside the courtroom.
In almost all instances the top adjudicator reads from a prepared script. But it is apparent that his written words are chosen carefully to deliver a choreographed message. The target of the message could be different at different times, but the media ensures that the message gets to the target audience.
The newsmaker knows that the media needs him as much as he needs the media. But the smart newsmaker also knows that he controls the information and the timing. These can be tailored to suit specific interests.
The army chief is also one of the main newsmakers in Pakistan. He speaks rarely, but when he does, headlines are ensured. Hence his information and its timing are even more planned and choreographed than that of the CJP. So in the lengthy press release that ISPR issued detailing the army chief’s statement, many messages were communicated to many people and institutions, and also to the public.
Such relaying of messages could not have been done directly through official channels. Instead of sniper shooting, the army command resorted to carpet-bombing.
Some news is event-driven, some is issue-driven, and some is agenda-driven. The last one is the most dangerous and this is where the media has to be on guard.
Some events and issues cannot be ignored and therefore the media has no choice but to cover them. But agendas come disguised in many forms. It is here that professional editorial sense can act as a block to manipulation.
The coming elections will be a huge challenge in this respect. They will be the first general elections where television will play a major role in determining perceptions and influencing voter choice.
Successful manipulation will hence pay tremendous political dividends. This is precisely why the media will put to perhaps its greatest test.
The writer is a prominent talk show host based in Islamabad
