We are told by our peers that journalism is not a profession but a passion, a noble mission. Tell this to the majority of media owners and editors today and they will laugh first and then look at you with disbelief. And don’t you dare to pour this passion-mission energy drink down the throat of an unpaid journalist with an empty stomach. If you do, then be ready to face what comes your way.
For their sufferings, the unpaid journalists blame many people including what they call the “prepaid” ones, who, they say, have the luxury of talking “mission” during the day and drinking “passion” in the night. We can define the pre-paid journalists as those, especially some TV anchors, who are constantly escorted by a consortium of sponsors and advertisers in their career journey.
Unlike the fortunate top paid journalists, there is an army of unpaid workforce in Pakistani newspapers and TV channels. They are unfortunate because they can’t tell the world their own stories. They are scared to tell, write and publish because if they do they will loose even the hope of getting paid one day. Their colleagues, who are being paid on time, are afraid to speak for the unpaid in their programmes and well read columns. And then there are those who do speak and write for the unpaid but their voices hardly get heard.
So much time has passed and arrears piled up that many of the unpaid journalists have stopped calculating. Till now, hundreds of employees belonging to newspapers and TV channels like Daily Times, Daily Khabrain, Capital TV, News One, Channel 5, Aaj TV have either been sacked or refused salaries for periods ranging from one month to over 11 months.
News One network has not paid salaries to its employees for the period of over seven months. Daily Times is defaulting over 11 months salary of its employees. Capital TV is another defaulter over three months of arrears. Over 50 employees went on strike in Islamabad office of Capital TV in October 2013. Capital TV refused to pay them immediately and announced to pay only those who were sacked or who had resigned. Resignation was indeed the only honorable way out for desperate and needy employees of the channel. But even then the employees got post-dated cheques as final settlement. Most of these employees did not even have the appointment letters.
This is just one example of many media houses where situation is no different. And those not paid in time keep working for months with the hope of getting paid one day and fear of not being paid at all if they stopped working or resigned. Many of these media workers do not even have their job contracts or appointment letters.
So, where do the journalists--who are supposed to tell the truth “even if heaven falls”-- stand today? Ironically for the sacked and unpaid journalists, the heavens have already fallen and yet they cannot tell the truth about themselves.
And what about those who think the hell has broken lose? There are complaints of landlords evicting these unpaid media persons from rented houses, children being withdrawn from better schools, personal properties being mortgaged for loans and their sick family members risking life to save expenses.
The tragic stories of miseries remain untold for two reasons: fear of annoying and scaring the future paymasters and shame of losing professional pride in the society. If some of these stories are told by the aggrieved journalists, almost none of them are ever published even by the rival and competitor newspapers. The competition for news and truth ends when the story of exploitation within begins.
Some media outlets did show courage -- though not for long. In a programme on DawnNews “Apna Gareban” a couple of years ago, I was able to tell the story of a young media worker who had committed suicide after non-payment of 5-months salary by Channel-5 in Lahore. It happened just before the marriage of his sister. The story never got reported or published widely for many months before DawnNews aired it.
The ‘eyes and ears of the society’ are not eye to eye with each other on this. The death of an ailing journalist is reported almost like a nonevent. Should the public expect from a journalist to speak the truth when he can’t even speak about his own miseries? These men struggle all their lives tell the stories of other people and yet their own stories remain obscure, with people least interested to know them.
It seems that truth is in short supply but it is not in much demand either. The public indifference to the plight of journalists, unholy nexus between government and media tycoons and every government’s inherent compulsion to keep the rift between media owners and their employees has only added to the woes of working journalists and employees.
The public indifference is understandable. Our respected readers, viewers, fans and followers, shell shocked by every day socio-economic explosions around them, are too afraid to ask for more truth. Battling the system for their bread and butter on daily basis, they cannot be expected to come out on streets and protest against sufferings of their “eyes and ears.” But it is this lack of popular ownership of news media by the societies that the governments are able to exploit, use and abuse the profession of truth telling. Every time there are protests by journalists and media workers against their owners or government against mass evictions or non-payment or delayed payment of their salaries, common people are nowhere to be seen.
A few media union office bearers and some politicians make it a ritual to take out a rally, make a few speeches, utter a few demands in brief news report for their publicity and then the file is closed. Our national media unions have for a long time failed to make a nation-wide call for a pen down strike.
Similarly, country’s business and media regulatory authorities also shamelessly and helplessly watch from the sidelines the exploitative, unstoppable and unaccountable genie of media. With the present policy making civil and military élite at the helm of affairs, the passion and mission of journalism has gone to the dogs. Even the statutory forums to ensure workers’ rights have miserably failed to take action against the powerful media tycoons.
Institutions like Implementation Tribunal for Newspaper Employees (ITNE) and National Industrial Relations Commission (NIRC) have failed to appreciate the enormity of the challenge and seem to have accepted their inability to perform. These forums seem to have become old age houses for the retired job seekers where sacked and salary-starved journos go for justice and return with “next date.”
Even the Supreme Court seems to have drawn a line which it doesn’t want to cross. Its judgment on Wage Board is yet to be fully implemented. While the Court depended a lot on media and its reports to exercise its extra-ordinary human rights jurisdiction, it has shown special restraint in dealing with big media groups. Numerous cases from tax and regulatory authorities are pending in courts for a long time with restraining orders favoring the media groups. It is ironical that the apex court enforces, what it thinks, are human rights on reports of journalists who themselves may be unpaid for months.
The unholy nexus between governments and media owners is also an open secret that has destroyed careers and lives of many professional journalists. Owing to this collusion, journalism, particularly TV journalism in Pakistan, is no more a mission but a business, a business where breaking or not breaking news or a no-news are both profitable.
For both government and media owners, TV business has become a do-or-die gamble. For them it is like world’s top class casinos where stakes are high and ethics are low priority. Even though in casinos some rules apply but here cheat codes are on public display. The largesse of government as advertisements on the basis of fake circulation figures of newspapers (as admitted by information minister Mr. Pervez Rashid) secretly funded campaigns for TV and print media, official advertisements for hundreds of dummy newspapers (some of them owned by government officials or their relatives), corporate sector including banks, telecom companies, and big construction tycoons like Bahria Town bulldozing, making and breaking business and careers of some media groups and journalists are some of the open secrets publicly belie the media industry’s claim to serve public interest.
Therefore, from merely an unholy nexus between government and media investors, the situation has now assumed the state of an ‘axis of evil’ formed by enemies of public interest, who believe more in infotainment than empowerment of the people through information.
Power politics and profit making are the two main factors behind most of new media investments in Pakistan. Journalists are being replaced by an army of semi-literate but thoroughly entertaining TV performers in the name of “ratings” and “infotainment.”
Now, many media owners need no editors and editors don’t need journalists. They need middlemen with access to power corridors and bedrooms, salesmen and commission agents, who can do business and bring business. Similarly, some politicians have also jumped in this big business. They are using TV businesses as a media shield against accountability and their channels as laundry machine for their black money with the stamp of PEMRA licenses.
Most of the traditional newspaper media owners are using TV investments to protect and expand their non-media businesses apart from trying to become “kingmakers.”
In the post 9/11 scenario, missiles and dollars were raining in Pakistan simultaneously. Subsequently, the media front saw death of public interest, ethics went missing, society injured and the truth, as usual, was the first casualty.
The powerful private broadcast sector suddenly grabbed the attention of masses seen by big powers, corporations and politicians as their market. NGOs and donors, tagged as civil-society, rushed in to help the victims of war. Pakistani media was the most used and abused entity in the post 9-11 scenario as donors and NGOs were desperate to show and publicize their performance to the paymasters through activities specially designed for media publicity rather than on ground impact.
A romance developed between the media and NGOs as the latter started buying airtime for their messages and the news coverage for NGO activities became a side offer. So irresistible was the “social activism” that today leading media groups have themselves established non-profit organizations in the name of foundations and trusts. They are openly bidding before international donors for media related projects with the trump card of unlimited news media coverage. The space is shrinking for public interest hardcore journalism. Owing to such funded “social activism”, most of the dedicated journalists seem to have become redundant and, in fact, an obstacle in the way of beneficiary media groups.
The dollarized media business is an offshoot of the War on Terror, which got its flanks covered through a well funded and popular “counter-extremism narratives.” The counter narratives were both subtle and visible, funded through declared and undeclared transactions. This led to a gold rush in TV business, overshadowing the silver lining of ethics in print media as well. An example of this is the highest airtime rates of regional TV channels like Pushto language Khyber TV which was in direct contact with the population in the theater of War on Terror.
It was during this period that the proud soldiers of pen and editors in print media were challenged by the greedy executives of television. In some cases, through real time broadcasts and debates TV media journalists were also able to surmount the traditional barriers of censorship within their respective newspaper groups. In the process, the cross media owners (newspaper owners who launched TV channels) found their own two swords crossing each other, competing for resources and editorial controls within the media group. Television was the most affected as editorial pendulum swung from one side to another on minute to minute basis.
Newspaper groups are pedigreed breed of media with greater depth, credibility and shelf life unlike some TV channels owners with no history and experience. Hence some of the old guards from print rightly look at their television counterpart as a “step-sister”, bent upon destroying the family budget through huge expenses. But the fact of “step sister” earnings more is also undeniable apart from the looming danger of facing sudden losses and hence the delayed payments. This indeed compels media owners to scramble for the newspaper earnings to keep the ball rolling.
In such a situation, no one really cares about the public interest or journalists and whether they have been paid or not. It is because governments, courts and the media bodies, all are getting paid one way or the other. In fact, some of them are the “prepaid” ones. This also explains why even the court’s judgments on wages of journalists never get implemented.
The above is the complete truth which journalists are mostly afraid to tell and it doesn’t mean that I was not either.
The writer is a TV anchor, court correspondent and a columnist and these are his personal views. He tweets @Matiullahjan919
