| January 27, 2008 | Sunday | Muharram 17, 1429 |
The plague of mismanagement and why we should fear for our lives
Hajrah Mumtaz
A telling episode recalled by harassed journalists is of an American reporter covering the forced withdrawal of Belgium from the then Belgian Congo. Upon landing at Lusaka airport, he saw a group of white women waiting to be evacuated and rushed over to them with the classic question: “Has anyone here been raped, and speaks English?” To a great extent, news stories are pre-written and in fact ‘write’ the journalists since the meanings they convey are already in circulation. The field is bound by conventions that are overwhelmingly powerful yet often unrecognised, because the tyranny of the deadline requires speed and efficiency that only conventions make possible. Furthermore, given that the news is produced by few and consumed by millions, the conventions often end up producing news that serves the interests of the dominant elite.
These conventions, particularly in television, attempt to control and limit the meanings of the events they convey. The type of stories, the form in which they will be presented and the programme structure into which they will be slotted are determined long before any of the events actually happen.
In a book titled Television Culture, John Fiske points out the basic definition of news as factual information that citizens need in order to meaningfully participate in society presents merely half the story. In fact, news is also a commodity. Expensive to gather and distribute, the news must create for itself an audience of the right size and composition to be sold to advertisers.
For a rapidly increasing number of people in Pakistan, televised news is the primary source of information about what is happening within the country and beyond its borders. It is therefore vital for both the producers and the viewers to understand the conventions that drive and confine television news.
News conventions
The first process of filtration is the set of conventions through which an event is considered newsworthy. Firstly, the event should have occurred within the last 24 hours. As a result, there is little sense of continuous history in the news and few references to previous events.
Then, a newsworthy event always concerns elite persons, i.e. persons who are familiar, either individually or in their symbolic social roles. So, people such as Pervez Musharraf or Imran Khan are familiar in their own right while in other cases, the roles are familiar even if the individuals vary: the militant, the mullah, the disaster survivor, the victim. The powerful tend to be familiar as individuals while the powerless or the voices of opposition are familiar mainly as social roles filled by a variety of forgettable individuals. Greater power, therefore, is conferred to familiar, already powerful individuals.
Through the news, consumers are indoctrinated to view the world in a certain way, regardless of the ground realities. News is what disrupts the normal and as Fiske writes, “What is absent from the text of the news, but present as a powerful force in its reading [ie the manner in which it is understood] are the unspoken assumptions that life is ordinarily smooth-running, rule- and law-abiding and harmonious.”
These norms embody a sense of what our social life ought to be rather than what it is, and in doing this they embody the ideology of the dominant classes.
There is also a link between elitism and negativity: the positive or ‘normal’ actions of elite people will be reported often but those without social power become newsworthy only when they are disruptive or deviant. So, it is often reported that Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim or Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi attended a foundation-laying ceremony and complimented the president, but the peasant becomes news only when he’s had his kidney cut out.
Categorisation and containment
Roughly, the news is divided into politics, the economy, foreign affairs, domestic news, occasional stories and sport. The actual categories are not hard and fast but the process of categorisation creates a conceptual grid within which ‘raw’ events can be instantly located and inserted into a familiar set of conceptual relationships. On the one hand, categories work as normalising agents and on the other, they serve as simple but effective structuring principles for building news programmes.
Categorisation is a part of the strategy through which the news masks its social process of representation and presents itself as objective. For example, stories on a famine in Africa, guerrilla activity in Sri Lanka, riots in Bangladesh or political corruption in Nicaragua, all placed in one category, invites the viewer to understand them in terms of their similarities rather than differences, ie as the world being a place of chaos, and the nation, by implication, being a safe refuge.
Most importantly, however, categories also separate stories. “The political practice of categorising social life into neat compartments – the economy, education, crime, industry, etc – is essentially a reactionary one,” writes Fiske, “because it implies that a ‘problem’ can be understood and resolved within its own category; localising the definition of problems encourages local ‘solutions’ and discourages any critical interrogation of the larger social structure.”
In other words, the categorisation and thereby the fragmentation of the news controls and limits the meanings of social life and constructs the interests of the elite into ‘natural’ common sense.
The ‘truth’
The news is presented and consumed as ‘objective truth’, but there are certain strategies through which this is achieved. For instance, the studio newscaster does not appear to author his own discourse but is presented as speaking the objective discourse of the ‘truth’, as an institutional voice. One step down is the reporter who speaks with both an individual and institutional voice, who mediates between ‘raw reality’ and the final truth spoken by the newscaster.
The impersonal authority of the newscaster’s words enhances the apparent ‘truth’ of the report. Through a process known as exnomination, certain views / institutions are presented as natural, universal and impossible to challenge. For example, “Mr Ahmed told the gathering that the lawyers’ struggle would continue,” is in the active voice and pins responsibility on the speaker. “Chief Justice Chaudhry was served detention orders” or “Mr Hussain was dismissed for alleged misconduct” is exnominated and in the passive voice. It does not nominate anyone in terms of responsibility and the action therefore becomes unchallengeable. Furthermore, in individualising the voice of a conflict, conflicts of interest are reduced to conflicts between individuals. As a result, the social origins of events are lost and individual motivation is assumed to be the origin of all action.
As any journalist knows, regardless of what an individual may say, the meaning is ultimately defined by the placing of the interview in the overall context of the story. In television news programming, which is linear in nature, much can be said merely through the sequence of the stories. A report on the desperation of people in the Gaza strip, followed by a White House spokesperson reiterating support for Israel has an overall meaning different from the same report being followed by one concerning growing militancy in Pakistan.
It therefore becomes vital for news producers and consumers to be aware of what they produce and absorb. Total objectivity in the news is virtually impossible because in the mere act of choosing an issue to highlight, the reporter or editor is drawing upon his own concept of what is newsworthy. However, this drawback can be mitigated if the news audiences educated themselves about the constraints of the field and became active rather than passive consumers.
— hmumtaz@dawn.com
YOU can tell how responsive a state is to its citizens, in a nutshell, by how it fares in health and education. Ours is bottom of the pits with no signs of the rainbow. The only signs we see on the horizon are those in the realm of insecurity bred by chaos.
Successive regimes have cheated upon the citizens and it mattered little whether it was the khaki or the mufti in charge, although by way of reason (at least in theory), it is always prudent to have a reasonably elected government in place than otherwise.
Many of our compatriots outside of Islamabad probably feel a sense of inferiority given that the seat of the federation, by virtue of its standing and strategic location, almost always gets the choice piece of the national meal.
They need not always feel hard done by, especially after the kind of insecurity endured by folks in the twin cities over time. We have had our share of blasts, both suicide and the non-suicide; a military operation, protests, both calm and wild; the lack of water, power, gas and flour; and last but not least, a perpetual uncertainty surrounding who is — and if polls go ahead — who will be in power.
And now, it seems, we have the haunting spectre of being hit by fatal disease(s), if the wonderful local authorities waste anymore time on getting the correct footing on waste management.
A news report last week quoted an environmentalist, Ghafoor Ahmed, as saying that the Capital Development Authority’s solid waste depositing methods in open grounds of Sector H-10 in Islamabad the beautiful could spread life-threatening diseases including plague and gastroenteritis.
When garbage is deposited in open places, Ahmed says, it serves as a breeding ground for rats, who multiply rapidly, which could induce plague that can kill a human being within 24 to 48 hours.
Open dumps attract other scavenging animals including pigs, insects and pests. Surface water percolating through the trash can dissolve out or leak harmful chemicals that are then carried away from the dump sites in surface or subsurface runoff.
The Ministry of Environment recently held a meeting and amid some fanfare announced plans to spend Rs1.25 billion to solve environment-related problems as part of the Islamabad Green City Project.
This included solid waste reduction and management with Caretaker Minister Wajid Bukhari directing the CDA officials to clean the nullahs (drains) and ensure these were not polluted by sewage.
One cannot fault the guideline but whether the same can be said of implementation is open to question given the past track record, and of which, the present and clear danger posed by literally, the dumping ground at H-10 is living proof.
Experts have called for an immediate review of the poor waste management methods lest there is an outbreak of an epidemic in close by G-9, G-10, I-9 and I-10 sectors.
Abandoned piles of household garbage, bags of yard waste, broken or burnt appliances, old barrels, used tires and demolition debris such as lumber, stones and pipes can threaten the health of humans, wildlife and the environment.
If allowed to remain, open dumps often grow larger and may attract dumping of both solid and hazardous wastes, posing the following health, safety and environmental threats:
* Fire and explosion * Inhalation of toxic gases * Injury to children playing on or around the dump site * Disease carried by mosquitoes, flies and rodents * Contam-ination of streams, rivers, lakes, soil, groundwater and drinking water * Damage to plant and wildlife habitats * Decrease in the quality of life to nearby residents and the local community
Needless to say, they create a public nuisance, divert land from more productive uses and depress the value of surrounding land.
As it is, the increasing risk posed by polluted water reservoirs in the twin cities particularly, Rawal Lake, is palpable. Gastroenteritis cases and infant mortality have both risen as a consequence.
The CDA is already under fire from environmentalists for allegedly discharging sewage into nullahs (drains) that often gets mixed with broken pipelines in the surface leading into houses. Raw sewage is said to contain material that is highly toxic and therefore, harmful for human consumption.
Waterborne diseases spread by contamination of drinking water systems. This is likely to occur where public and private drinking water systems get their water from surface waters (rain, creeks, rivers, lakes etc.), which can be contaminated by infected animals or people.
Runoff from landfills, septic fields, sewer pipes, residential or industrial developments can also sometimes contaminate surface water.
This has been the cause of many dramatic outbreaks of faecal- oral diseases such as cholera and typhoid. The germs in the faeces can cause the diseases by even slight contact and transfer.
Over the past decades, the canvas of water-related human health issues has become increasingly comprehensive, with the emergence of new water-related infection diseases and the re-emergence of ones already known.
The Islamabad Green City Project encapsulates most of the environmental issues. But it will be a test case of the authorities’ resolve to particularly address the dangerous waste and water management problems before something disastrous happens.
The writer is News Editor at Dawn News. He may be contacted at kaamyabi@gmail.com