Meet the Newsroom

By Hassan Belal Zaidi –

…and lock the door on your way out, will you?

For many years now, a multitude of political leaders, opportunistic hacks, clerics, celebrities and sundry opinion leaders have been moaning about this prodigal child, known as the Pakistani news media. Indeed, if one were to believe everything one reads in the papers or sees on TV, the aforementioned ‘villains’ would be chased out of town by crazed men bearing torches and pitchforks. However, since that has not happened too often, we can safely assume that the people of our fair backwater are smarter than we given them credit for.

But it’s not like the news lies to you, deliberately or otherwise. Neither do they intend to mislead you by misrepresenting facts. News and media professionals are, after all, professionals. They get paid to do a certain job, and if in doing so, they can make the channel a cart-load of money, all the better. But who are these so-called professionals? How do they come up with the stuff that they do? Are they even human? Do they ever sleep? Is it true that most of them are paid by their organizations in tea and cigarettes? Are they ‘marriage material’? If any of these questions have ever crossed your mind, read on, as I give you more information about the intricate workings of the newsroom than you ever could have wanted.

Just another day

Working for a newspaper, or worse, a TV news channel, is definitely not for the faint of heart. It is also not the place where one would find ‘nice guys’ or ‘decent girls’. Everyone in the newsroom is, in one way or the other, scarred for life. Newsrooms do not afford ‘normal people’ and such individuals usually assimilate, disintegrate or evaporate. Assimilation occurs only for those who have prior newsroom experience and know how to keep their heads above the muddy waters of the news desk. Disintegration entails the complete crushing of an otherwise normal person’s sense of self, the subjugation of his/her will and the reincarnation of that person in the image of the mentor that he/she has had the misfortune of acquiring in their brief time in said newsroom. Evaporation is the least nasty thing that can happen to someone, because it means that the person in question will simply disappear from the newsroom, never to be seen or heard from again. That is, until they are in the news for making some remarkable discovery, being the founder of a multi-million dollar ‘dot com’ or for setting a new world record in synchronized swimming: building essentially upon skills they acquired in the newsroom.

This is because the newsroom is a capacity-building environment in the way that an ocean is a sink-or-swim environment. Any
skills you obtain here are amplified out in the real world, because the newsroom is a larger-than-life manifestation of the real world. It contains all the typical personalities that you will ever encounter on the outside and, if you’re lucky, you will learn to deal with them quite effectively.

Live-and-in-your-face

Ever wondered why all famous people think journalists are jerks? I’ll give you hint: it’s because the only journalists they interact with are reporters and camerapersons. There is, I am sure, a special place in hell for both, because the last thing you need is a nosy reporter up your backside 24 hours a day with a baby-light-toting cameraman in tow. But, let’s face it, digging for dirt wherever they may find it is their job description. In fact, the original recipe for ‘staff reporter’ calls for mixing lawyers, prostitutes and cats in equal parts. The lawyer in them makes them obnoxious, self-righteous, cocksure and certain that they know best; the prostitute lends flexibility, a killer instinct and a love for money; while the cat-part makes them elusive, moody and severely territorial. Ask any trainee who has had the misfortune of filing a story that infringed upon the beat of another, more senior reporter. Women scorned, I am told, are timid mice compared to the snorting bulls that emerge from within senior staff reporters when they find their beat has been ‘trespassed’.

TV reporters are a different breed, though. Immaculately dressed and made up with layers of foundation, these plastic individuals are no more than glorified news readers. However, in the modern age of facsimile, email and the interweb, TV reporters are the only ones who have to actually be where the story is breaking. The rest just sit home and write the story based on the leg-work done by their brethren on the telly. This is also why most TV reporters are bitter, cynical individuals. Being inherently twisted people who derive a perverse pleasure from asking inane and stupid questions, they are only capable of maintaining a long term relationship with two other kinds of people, camerapersons and assignment editors. More on these species in a bit. But now, a message from our sponsors.

Everybody’s a manager

If you ask anyone from the newsroom what they do in public, they will reply with an ambiguous title, like ‘rundown manager’ or ‘assignment coordinator’. The most priceless ever heard has to be ‘facilitator’, which is, in fact, a euphemism for tea boy. In fact, if you ever get a chance to glance through at an attendance register for any newsroom (Yes, they have those. It’s just like being back in fourth grade), you would be hard pressed to tell the worker bees from the managers.

That is because, everyone is a manager of one sort or the other. Apart from copywriters, non-linear editors and panel technicians, everyone else is a producer or editor or some sort. And because it’s mostly a horizontal hierarchy; gutka and passive aggression against those more-junior-yet-peers is as commonplace as half-drained cups of tea. The only people who can claim to rule this cockamamie roost are the assignment editor, the input in charge and the panel producer.

Newspapers are different, in that the horizontal passive aggression is divided over two levels; the small fry and the big dogs. So the two news editors will not see eye to eye and one should not expect the chief news editor and the shift-in charge to agree much either. But they all bow to the superior-however-faulty judgement of the editor-in-chief. There have been many young knights, drunk on their newfound authority over the minions of the newsroom, who have tried to challenge the editor-in-chief or engage him on an issue. Most have crashed and burnt, losing their pensions as well as their jobs. But some have survived. They persist and are known as quality editors, glorified proofreaders. I should know, I used to be one. They are usually wordsmiths and the entire organization, from the plates section to the web team and the editor himself, recognizes without question their impeccable judgement on all things linguistic. Such individuals are also lovingly referred to as ‘grammar Nazis’, highly paid ones.

There’s nothing an edit won’t fix

The power to shape people’s opinions and perceptions is a heady one. The knowledge that you, an individual, can control what hundreds of thousands of people are going to see and (mostly) believe to be true, changes a lot of people, usually not for the better. These people start taking their jobs too seriously, becoming moral crusaders against the unseen enemy. This is where the ‘us and them’ narrative in the news stems from. Senior producers, assignment editors, copy editors and even the odd news anchor, have all been known to adopt the persona of the ‘common man’ in order to sell their stories. Therefore, an increase in everything from fuel prices to the inflation rate constitutes an infringement upon the rights of any individual. Usually, this means that someone on the copy desk had to pay an extra Rs 100 in cab fare that day and blamed the hike on fuel price rises.

Next thing you know, this anecdote has been picked up by the shift in charge, packaged together with vox pops and an eloquent script decrying the government’s indifference to the common man’s plight, and shoved into the 9PM news bulletin as the top ‘public interest’ story of the hour. By doing this, the senior khalifas, as they are known by the newsrooms that love them, are atoning for the blatant exaggeration and tomfoolery that has been written into every subsequent script.

But the greatest weapon at the disposal of these modern day caliphs is the power of editing. You don’t need to have a degree in filmmaking to know that editing can change the context of anything. Anything. Any situation, any quote, any soundbyte, any act.

So you see, they don’t mean to sensationalize, or quote anyone out of context; but it’s not juicy if they don’t. The news business, like show business, is all about the visuals. What looks attractive and what sounds attractive will be what goes on air.

The writer is a former journalist and now works in development sector