Community-based radio and TV

While the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) established in March 2002 under the Pemra Ordinance promulgated in the same month has reportedly already issued 29 licences for new private radio stations, several of which are expected to commence broadcasting in 2003 and 2004, the enormous deficit in community-based, non-profit radio stations and TV channels serving local needs in a direct and participatory manner remains unfulfilled because their number is zero.

While viewership of TV has grown and listenership of radio has declined in recent years, the popularity of FM radio symbolizes the still untapped potential of this powerful medium. Radio also remains a popular medium in the very society where TV dominates, i.e., the USA. The new digital satellite technologies have also raised the quality of radio broadcast to new levels. For Pakistan with a population that is still more than 60 per cent illiterate and about 40 per cent below the poverty line, radio deserves the highest priority.

With the establishment of the new local government system in 2001 and 2002, the urgency to provide electronic media at the grass-roots level for the benefit of the people becomes greater.

In essence, the need for community-based radio stations and TV channels is part of a broader, on-going historical struggle to provide people at large, specially the poor and middle income classes, with authentic instruments of empowerment.

As tools of power, electronic media in South Asia have been almost obsessively possessed by the state. Even as private channels have recently proliferated through satellite TV, the original, preponderant, proprietorial feature of state ownership of electronic media has persisted to this day.

Democracies as well as dictatorships in South Asia have shared this remarkable preference for state ownership and control of electronic media. Neither India nor Sri Lanka, which have had virtually uninterrupted democracy since independence and have had no military interventions, have been unable to wholly separate the state from the proprietary relationship with electronic media.

The dichotomy between a vigorously free press and state-owned electronic media has survived even those governments in Pakistan which were headed by persons claiming liberal credentials.

After due credit is given to the military government of General Pervez Musharraf (1999-2002) for being possibly the most tolerant military government ever in terms of a free press, as also of permitting unrestricted criticism during live telecasts and broadcasts on state-owned radio and TV, both that government and the present government of Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali too have been unable to surrender state proprietorship of electronic media through PBC and PTV, though Pemra is allowed to issue licences for private electronic media.

The suggestion for community electronic media to be established on a mass and prolific basis throughout the country, in rural areas, in small towns and in neighbourhoods of large cities represents an attempt to check and balance the pre-dominance of state power and now also of corporate power in electronic media, with non-official people’s power in the same sphere.

The longer the delay in introducing a new and progressive approach to community-based electronic media, the greater will become the discrepancy and mismatch between the new local government system that seeks to devolve power to the grass-roots level and a centralized electronic media system which retains control over TV and radio in Islamabad.

While being critical of the continued state ownership and government-control of electronic media it is equally necessary to acknowledge that such officially-controlled media have served the public interest in several major respects. The propagandistic content of state-owned electronic media is a separate and distinct part of their operations. Other parts of their content and functions have projected themes and material through news, commentary, drama, grass-roots based programmes featuring the people’s own voices, folk music, humour and entertainment: a large number of relevant and significant needs of low-income and middle-income people have been articulated and reflected on a consistent basis by PTV and PBC.

By broadcasting every day in about 20 languages and dialects spoken across the country, Radio Pakistan has also accurately portrayed the pluralism and rich variety that marks the cultural kaleidoscope of Pakistan at the community level.

Though less pluralistic in comparison to PBC, Pakistan Television has also sought to be faithful to the range and breadth of our languages and our cultures. For example, the Quetta station of PTV telecasts news bulletins every day in Brahavi, Balochi, Pushto and Urdu. There is now also a PTV National channel that telecasts exclusively in regional languages.

Yet the structures of state-owned electronic media remain monolithic; access to their inner sanctums where content is shaped remains difficult for the average citizen and, in many cases, the transmission power of radio stations of neighbouring countries is more powerful and clear than the transmission quality of our own national radio stations.

Symbolizing the profit driven aspect of privately-owned electronic media, the three FM radio stations authorized through the monopolistic licences given by the second Benazir Bhutto government in 1995 represent the other extreme: of content shaped primarily by marketing motivations. Even where such commercial media include purely public service material in their programming, the basic streak running right through them is a sales-based approach to mass communications. In their own specific niche, commercially driven electronic media have the right to function as part of a market economy.

The two extremes define the existing framework: at one end, state-owned media and at the other, the commercially driven media. Thus, the rationale to promote campus media and community media becomes clear and inescapable. Campus media, or educational media such as the virtual university TV channel, or radio stations located on university campuses serve numbers that are still minorities in a country where the majority remains illiterate. Only community-based electronic media, low cost, small in scale, but easily and instantly accessible to the people become truly representative media. They serve both as a deterrent against dominance, and a positive factor which provides balance.

Two questions remain — and the fact that they remain conclusively unanswered neither invalidates the questions, nor reduces the urgency of the need for community electronic media.

The first question is whether media in general and community electronic media in particular are able to transform empowerment through information into empowerment that actually changes, for the better, the historic structures of political and economic control?

The second question is whether community-based electronic media can be successfully introduced in all human societies, irrespective of the degree to which they have been able to sublimate and tame historic divisions and differences within communities at ethnic, religious, linguistic and sectarian levels?

On an ideal level to which we should all aspire, the answer to both the above questions should be in the affirmative. As we take steps towards reaching the ideal, we must ensure that we are well-equipped for the journey - because well begun is half done.