HOPES that saner counsel might succeed in forestalling the extra-constitutional actions that had been hinted at in media reports were obviously groundless. The army chief has taken a step that is fraught with consequences too grave to be contemplated with equanimity.

The sweep and tone of General Pervez Musharraf’s announcement of Saturday have no precedent even in Pakistan’s chequered history. Emergency is a euphemism for a complete break with the Constitution. The ill-starred basic law has been put in abeyance for a second time in about 30 years. For the first time judiciary’s conduct has been offered as one of the main reasons for disrupting constitutional order. The way the judiciary has been purged, and the justice system’s presiding figure and two high court chief justices have been felled, will stir a controversy unlikely to be resolved in favour of the General, even if something more drastic does not happen. Besides the people have been thrown at the mercy of an executive free of judicial overseeing.

The announcement that the federal and provincial assemblies and the state apparatus will continue to function cannot conceal their loss of constitutional sanction. To say that the regime’s crisis of legitimacy has been aggravated is an under-statement. Pakistan may well have been pushed into a blind alley and its capacity to come out unscathed is seriously in doubt.

The decreeing of a second Provisional Constitution Order (PCO) by Gen Musharraf also is something his predecessors avoided. When Ayub Khan found the edifice designed by him collapsing he held his own hand and called upon Gen. Yahya Khan to carry out the mercy killing. No elaborate discussion is needed to show that the issuance of the new PCO puts a cross on everything General Musharraf has done over the past eight years, including the PCO of October 14, 1999 and the LFO of 2002 and the 17th Amendment.

The indefinite scope of the latest proclamation is a measure of the state of despair inspiring it, and the adage that acts born of such despair carry the seeds of their own destruction will unsettle the whole nation with forebodings of an unimaginable ordeal. General Musharraf may be right in emphasising the gravity of the situation caused by the menace of militancy and the receding writ of the state. But there is no reason to suppose that the state’s complete eviction from moral ground will make its writ stronger. This is not the course public opinion at home and well-wishes abroad had been urging upon Islamabad. The whole world was waiting for a transition to democracy after a fair general election. Now everything has become uncertain. The frustration that uncertainty will cause among the people, especially the democratic majority, may bring the state under greater strains than any problem could have caused.

The regime is better aware then the citizens of Pakistan’s need of international community’s goodwill, and one wonders about the nature and size of the risk taken by volunteering for a pariah’s role in the comity of nations. The rhetoric that one hears about Pakistan being the master in its domain does not confer upon the custodians of power the right to push the nation on to a suicidal course. The medicine now administered to Pakistan’s polity is like carbolic acid that does not account for bad germs only and kills the health-giving germs also. Pakistan may have survived the martial laws in the past, the crises it faces at the moment have rendered it incapable of enduring another spell of absolute rule. There is a complete consensus on this point. Extreme measures produce equally extreme reactions. Those immediately affected - judges, lawyers, media community, all those who had set their sights on elections, and the conscious reactions of society - face a grim test. They must avoid rash actions. They will need to find rational and effective ways to play their part in pulling the country’s away from the yawning chasm down the brink.

The foremost need at the moment seems to be to explore the possibility of damage control. The ideal course will be withdrawal of Saturday’s proclamation and actions taken pursuant to it. That should not be impossible if national interest and the will of the people are held supreme. However, if that is not possible for one vacuous reason or another, the least the regime must do to assuage the hurt caused to the people is to make the latest deviation from civilized rule as short as possible, restore the judiciary’s due status, dissolve the legislatures and move to hold elections within the next few weeks. Wisdom demands the courage to withdraw an action that will embarrass the whole country for ages.

While reporters always do their best to get the facts straight, there are nevertheless complaints of misquotes, incorrectly-attributed statements and mixed-up facts. On the news side, the record can subsequently be set straight with follow-ups, clarifications and in the worst case scenario, retractions. It is also not uncommon for seriously aggrieved parties to take a news organisation to court.

In other words, a system of journalistic accountability, both internal and external, is in place on the news side, which leads to more responsible reporting and editing.

In terms of reporting on culture, however, such accountability is glaringly absent. If a mistake occurs, setting the record straight is generally at priority and people in the entertainment business can do little other than complain. Filing a case against a mammoth news organisation is not really an option while complaints to section heads or reporters are often dismissed out of hand or, at best, result in some verbal placation.

In terms of reporting on culture, such lack of journalistic responsibility is made all the more serious by the fact that news reviews and media comments seriously affect careers in music, dance, cinema, theatre, literature and a host of other fields.

A young person starting out in the music business, for example, recently complained that in a newspaper interview of his band, the writer had made errors such as the band’s history and their lyricist. I recommended writing a note of complaint to the section head. But the young man said that he had done exactly that when a different publication got the facts wrong, with the result that in the next issue, the magazine published a scathing article on his band. “Reviewers have every right to pan our work but the criticism should at least be from a musical point of view, by someone who understands the field,” he said ruefully. “That reporter knew nothing about music but his comments were printed anyway.”

The unfortunate experience points towards some deficiencies in entertainment-related journalism in Pakistan. For one thing, as has been written in this space earlier, commenting on fields such as music and the performing arts is not recognised as the technical task it actually is. Court and crime beats require the reporter to have some degree of knowledge about the way in which Pakistan’s system of law enforcement works. A journalist writing on these fields knows there is a legal difference between a person arrested and one indicted. Similarly, anyone writing on music ought to know the difference between rock and soul and the meanings of terms such as a bridge or a riff. Someone writing a theatre review should be able to tell the theatre of the absurd from realism.

The other issue illustrated by the musician’s predicament is that the sudden boom in the media has led to severe shortages of trained manpower, so that people can be appointed to positions that require more journalistic experience than they really have. As a result, section editors in the print and broadcast media sometimes display a lack of true understanding about their power and responsibility. And since the culture desk in both print and television is regarded as a non-technical field, under-experienced recruits often end up there. This is dangerous because their relative professional immaturity renders them poorer judges of quality in content. This, I believe, is one the reasons behind the falling standards displayed by a number of culture-related articles and programmes.

For musicians, the situation is made worse by the effects of piracy since there is no real record of album sales, while the lack of credible surveys means that estimates of audience popularity are also, at best, informed guesswork. This makes the role of the media in reviewing musical work even more important since the amount and slant of coverage constitutes a significant measure of a band’s success.

The print and broadcast media must make every effort to ensure that their coverage is factual, balanced and informed; it must not be based on the quality of the band’s marketing managers. While it is true that marketing plays an increasingly significant role in increasing musicians’ profiles across the world, Madonna or Ravi Shankar can quote album sales to argue that their popularity is not a triumph of media marketing. Those in Pakistan cannot.—hmumtaz@dawn.com