During a journalism course that I was teaching to undergrad freshmen, they asked me which TV anchor I consider most respect worthy.
I thought about it for a minute and named Iftikhar Ahmed, Hamid Mir and Kamran Khan of Geo. The students were probably intrigued and asked me why. My response was quite straightforward: for starters, they are proper journalists who have been practising their craft throughout their professional careers and did not switch to television journalism from filmmaking, practising medicine and selling used cars.
Secondly, they have not jumped ship at any given opportunity and stayed with the same organization for most of their careers.
Why do TV anchors and presenters switch from one channel to another? Some say they do it because they want more editorial freedom, some say they move to bigger channels because they want their voice to get to more people but the sticking factor — though most would not admit to it — is a fatter paycheck.
There is one TV anchor who has probably broken all records by working in five different channels — Geo, ARY, Express, Dunya, Waqt TV and is now almost a done deal at a new one — in the last seven years.
Generally, people who stick to a channel are respected more than those who hop from one channel to the other. Sticking to one channel also helps the anchor build a programme. For instance, the audience knows that it is Hamid Mir who does Capital Talk but if you ask them about the programme that Dr. Shahid Masood is doing, they probably will not even know what channel he is on these days.
There are other anchors, who have stayed with the same channel like Kashif Abbasi but he may not enjoy the same pull for other reasons.
A journalist associated with print media says she has stopped watching current affairs programmes because they keep switching from one channel to the other and she finds it unnerving.
She is not in a club of one; one of the regular complaints that people in the media industry have about these changes is that they are superficial and almost always about money. They never bring any noticeable change to the content of the programme; at times, they would even put up the same set and even the exact replica of their old programme.
Such anchors enjoy the same respect among their audience as politicians switching loyalties before election time.
According to Munira Cheema, a media analyst based in London, politicians may change their political affiliations out of change in their ideologies or because of the clan pressure but anchors who lynch these politicians for switching sides do it for money alone.
Experts also say TV anchors should not even be called journalists because most did not cut it in their field. They were doctors, practising advertising and were running businesses before the electronic media boom hit Pakistan and they seized that opportunity to build their personal clout.
Now, they may have journalists working in their teams but most of us know that they are not journalists themselves and would move on to more lucrative opportunities.
Nusrat Javeed who hosts Bolta Pakistan at Aaj news calls them showbiz personalities because calling them journalists would be factually incorrect.
There are anchors, who think that they are more important than their message and believe their viewers would remain loyal to them and simply switch with them to their new programme/channel.
Perhaps, they could do with a reality check: most people who enjoyed success in one channel could not repeat it in other channels. Asma Shirazi’s programme enjoyed much higher ratings in Samaa but things have changed for her since she moved to Dawn News and her programme does not enjoy the same ratings as it did with Samaa although she did recently win an award for the best female anchor.
Talat Hussein was a name to be reckoned with when he was with Aaj News. Who can forget his back bending heroics in the newsroom when he tried to dodge the bullets — those who have seen that office would know that a bullet would have to ricochet around thirteen walls before it can reach the recording studio but I digress — and emerged a hero.
He moved onto Dawn News and then to Express News but people still associate him with Aaj because of his award winning performance on May 12, 2007 when he conducted a live transmission from underneath the desk.
Some even provide major comic relief with their constant hopping. Back in the day when I was working for Geo, a news anchor who moved in from another channel asked his audience to continue watching Aaj News — his old channel — while he was reading news at Geo. He did not stay there for long and is now onto his fourth channel as a news anchor.
A former journalist and media enthusiast Zeenia Shaukat believes that the corporate set-up of our news organizations is hurting the news business.
“Pakistan is following the global media regime where rather than presenting content to the audience, the media presents audience to advertisers. So it is natural for corporate media to make an effort to attract top presenters to make their content more competitive not for the audience but for the advertisers,” Zeenia Shaukat says.
Pakistan’s media channels function as corporates and ‘switching jobs’ of talent/human resource is a normal part of a corporate culture. What really needs to be debated is that if media should actually act like a corporate entity treating and promoting information as a “product” and if journalists should see their job as merely that of “producers of information”. This is important because information is a public good and not a product!
Seeing the work of the existing TV channels, it appears apart from their logos and graphic designing, there isn’t much difference amongst these channels in terms of the content being offered.
All current affairs shows, mostly led by well known anchors, follow the same line, present the same range of opinions, invite the same range of guests, and their take on issues is more or less similar.
Besides, there is heavy emphasis on presenting sound bytes and quotes that create a buzz so people are running after that instead of going after content that is informative and coherent.
As far as channel hopping is concerned, anchors do take the lead from politicians in the quest for plots and other financial gains; they are also changing loyalties like them and have it much better than the politicians as no-one calls them lota like they call the politicians.
The writer is a media consultant based in Rawalpindi. She is also a major league blogger, giving her two pennies at http://tazeen-tazeen.blogspot.com
