| July 24, 2003 | Thursday | Jumadi-ul-Awwal 23, 1424 |
Cross-media ownership: caution required
This comment is with reference to the statement issued by the honourable president and secretary-general of the Council of Pakistan Newspapers Editors (CPNE) as reported on July 22 hailing the recent decision by the federal cabinet to permit newspaper owners to set up TV channels.
I believe he meant no offence. Sarmad Sehbai was merely trying to dramatize his respect for the artisans when in a spree of name calling at PNCA’s “Dialogue on Art” some weeks back he described the Lok Virsa setup as pimps, which anybody, with a little feel of the appellation and how it is generally lightly used by elderly people and among friends, would say was a pejorative compliment to the effectiveness of the class of vendors he was referring to. The annual folk culture bazaar that the Lok Virsa holds at Shakarparian may be its only visible activity but, we cannot deny, it sells. And it may indeed be promoting some objects of our folk craft which is probably the stated purpose of the creation of this organization. Whether it is supposed also to lend dignity to cobblers and carpenters and spinners is not known. The Lok Virsa is doing what in bureaucratic parlance we call the ‘needful’. In government if the needful is being done, it is enough to get an excellent ACR.
This is not to say, however, that one does not share Sehbai’s compassion for the craftsmen and the artisans who are placed in stalls as if they were their own merchandise, not producers but their own product. Patronage of arts and crafts is not concerned with questions of dignity. The professions which are put on display do not enjoy the kind of respect in our society which we feign that they do in order to look more democratic than we actually are. But the Darbar, unconcerned with their dignity as human beings, has always patronized them because the man who is content with spinning his yarn and the potter who consumes his time minding the roundness of his pitcher are the safest bets for the establishment. So are the regular guys, the hymn makers and the eulogizers and the painters of date palms, apples and fat cows. It is when the artisan becomes an artist and leaves his father’s craft that the patrons start looking askance. That is where the Lok Virsa’s job ends.
But Sehbai was not a little confused in his talk. He was mixing up things. One would have wanted to know what he meant by the ‘mainstream’ that he thought both Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Allama Iqbal were part of, and which he differentiated from the other school of which he was a votary, namely the Dionysian that admitted of no system, was totally unrestrained, instinctive, inspirational and spontaneous. What he seemed to be suggesting was that true art was an act of creation that took place when one stepped out of the mainstream. It obeyed no law and was beyond the grasp of any rational system and lay outside the boundaries of conventional knowledge. By inference what he meant to convey was that though Iqbal and Faiz and others were good poets, they were not genuine artists. They were part of a system and worked within its confines. But the art tradition which this system represented was not aligned with the spirit of the people or the culture of the masses. It was mainstream in a formal way as it was not part of the oceanic current that surged from the salt of the land and that one tasted in the mystic poetry of the Sufis. The heart of the people throbbed with the beat of their simple song. And so, Sehbai said, people in their droves of thousands thronged to the Urs ceremonies of these saints uninvited, whereas all that one saw at the mazaar of the Allama was the sight of two sentries to keep the throngs away. That, the Urs, he told Lok Virsa, was our culture and not what they were doing at Shakarparian.
There is a lot of confusion in all this. What one would expect from intellectuals is some clarity to clear the cobwebs that cloud the common man’s vision. While spontaneity and inspiration can be discovered in a piece of art, all creators of art would testify that a great deal of ‘mainstream’ hard work, practice and learning went into every effortless looking creation. Even the crowd pulling saints have had to spend many nights of ritual vigil and riazat before achieving their spiritual goals. The Zen system which aims more specifically at spontaneity as the essential quality of a perfect act, prescribes months and years of practice till one becomes able to shoot directly without taking aim. The perfect act is executed when the painter becomes the paint and the painting drips from the brush. But this is elementary. Sehbai’s own work, snatches of which were shown to the audience to prove his point, all went to belie his theory of art as some kind of frenzied orgasm that a bolt of inspiration generated. Sehbai works with great passion but he also works with great care. Among producers of our television he stands out for two things: his treatment of the themes he takes up is not hackneyed and his work is a studied presentation free of shoddy padding. Then he modulates his scenes to punctuate a visual statement. Seen thus, if I understand correctly, it is patently mainstream work that he does.
As to culture, perceptions seem to be getting fuzzier by the day. The thronging of people to the mazars of saints is not entirely cultural as he maintained. It has a lot to do with misgovernance, poverty and ignorance. If governments could solve peoples daily problems of bread and butter, if there were rulers people could take their problems to, they would not go to Pirs and Aastanas and Darbars. There seems much truth in the opinion that Sufi institutions flourish under despotic governments and much of what we see as popular culture is flourishing beneath the poverty line.
Now, as to art there can be as many theories about it as there are artists under the sun, particularly in the mainstream, since, on the other side, creation is not a conscious act; it is a fusion of spirit and beauty like God’s work that demands no wages, makes no explanation and seeks no opinion. If all art could aspire to that level, there would remain no books for Shams Tabrez to burn. The saint did a very unIslamic thing. For what would one READ, the first command, if there were no books. Rumi could have filed an arson suit against him and if book burning was a lawful act in those days, wilful destruction of private property could be made the plea for some mainstream justice.
Sehbai had brought a couple of very well-written pages to preface his monologue. He read them with great flair concluding that all that he had said was hogwash. In a less self-deprecating mood he could have called it holy bunkum. In reality all acts of creation result in absolute vacuity, exhaustion and even a mild self-loathing because, perhaps, man runs short of adequacy in the process. He loses control. The Creator on the other hand has total control but is not keen on perfection. He has no critical standards to come up to. He does not read.
There appears to be an unfortunate misunderstanding about alleged restrictions placed on cross-media ownership by the original ordinance.
The PEMRA Ordinance was actually promulgated on March 1, 2002 (about 16 months after I resigned from the cabinet in October 2000). I was associated with the drafting of the law (which substantially reflects its earlier two versions) in my capacity as information adviser and minister from November 1999 to October 2000 (when it was called the RAMBO Ordinance) and earlier as a minister in the caretaker government of President Farooq Leghari and Prime Minister Malik Meraj Khalid in 1996-97 when the law was promulgated on February 14, 1997 as the EMRA Ordinance.
For the record, the creation of a “National Electronic Media Authority” (NEMA) was first proposed by this writer in an article titled: “Democratizing the electronic media” published in Dawn in 1992. Whether in NEMA or EMRA or RAMBO or PEMRA, a consistent concern has been to ensure that the law enables equity for all citizens in being eligible to own electronic media through a transparent licensing process which prevents arbitrary monopolies.
An unhealthy private media monopoly was created in 1995 when Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto awarded contracts for FM radio (known as FM-100) and for Shaheen TV on outrageously exclusive terms without advance public notice and without inviting competitive bids. A public interest petition under Article 184 challenging this action filed by Dr Mubashir Hasan and this writer was admitted by the Supreme Court in May 1996 and three hearings were held the same year. Earlier, in 1992, a similar monopoly for NTM on the STN TV channel was also challenged in the Sindh High Court.
Precisely in order to eliminate the scope for future monopolies of any kind, the EMRA law and the RAMBO law, as also Clause-23 of the PEMRA ordinance 2002, is titled: “Exclusion of monopolies”. Section-2 of this clause specifies that, in the interest of open and fair competition, a licence should not be given to an applicant who is already associated with another mass medium in case such a new licence creates “undue concentration of media ownership” in a particular area or category. The ordinance itself does not, and did not ever place an outright ban on newspaper owners from also being eligible for radio and TV licences.
The provision for avoiding “undue concentration of media ownership” was included to ensure that newspaper owners did not gain unfair advantages over other applicants for licences or existing licencees.
As compared to radio, which is comparatively low cost, investment required for TV channels pre-qualifies only those with access to substantial finances. This factor makes it all the more necessary to ensure that prior material and media resources do not pre- dominate the electronic media environment of our country at the expense of those who wish to express a distinct policy viewpoint, but do not have financial resources to match large groups.
However, the PEMRA rules which were framed after my resignation from the Cabinet, went one major step beyond the law in violation of the basic principle that rules should help implement the law, and not change the law itself.
PEMRA Rule-17(5) went to the extreme of specifically making the owner of a newspaper or magazine, amongst others, ineligible for owning or operating electronic media.
Such an unreasonable rule could have been challenged in a court of law by an aggrieved potential applicant and would have, most likely, been struck down by the court.
As of July 23, no information has been published in the press or broadcast by the media giving precise details of the exact decision made by the federal cabinet nine days ago.
Before taking a decision to amend the PEMRA ordinance, the government should have circulated for public information the text of the proposed amendment in order to elicit public opinion.
Also, if parliament had been functioning normally, the amendment should have been debated there, to enable various viewpoints to be expressed before finalizing an approach to the issue.
A detailed comment will have to wait till the actual text of the amendment to the ordinance, or to the rules, is made available. But it needs to be noted now that there was no intention whatsoever to place an outright ban on cross-media ownership either in 1996-97 or in 2000 when the RAMBO ordinance was twice, in April and in August, given provisional approval by the federal cabinet nor was there such a ban in the PEMRA ordinance as enforced in March 2002.
The experience and resources of newspaper owners should, in principle, be positive factors when also applied to electronic media.
At the same time, there is a need to avoid undue concentration of media power as a matter of public interest.
In a short period of only 16 months of existence, PEMRA has covered considerable ground and issued over 24 licences for private commercial radio stations. The two priorities that now require PEMRA’s attention is to prevent the creation of monopolies, or of media cartels, in the interest of free and fair competition and to facilitate the establishment of low-cost, non- profit, community-based radio and TV stations which will help to broaden and balance ownership of electronic media.