Folklore tells us two important things about genies. One, that they are proverbially hard to send back once they’ve been let out of their bottles, and two, that the wishes they grant can be a blessing or a curse, depending upon the motives of the person making the wish.

So too with the growing power of the media in Pakistan, it seems, a subject that has become as contentious as the events of the past year during which media organisations found themselves at the forefront of battles they did not knowingly initiate. As our president found to his cost, the media genie had been let out of the bottle and could no longer be arbitrarily contained.

When he decided six months ago that the media had to be dealt with, the retired general’s confidence may have been bolstered by memories of the ease with which army personnel scaled the walls of PTV’s Islamabad offices and ordered a complete news blackout the year he embarked upon his career in politics. But he did not, perhaps, truly understand the changes that were wrought in those intervening years between October 1999 and November 2007, during which the media grew from one compliant state-owned channel to a rowdy, multi-tongued rabble. What’s more, the man who would be king now also had to contend with the immense reach of the international media and alternative sources of news such as the internet and live road shows of banned programmes. It is now apparent that the president, poor thing, never foresaw a situation where the very absence of news would merit world headlines.

Times have changed since November, however – or so they say, anyway. Hope springs eternal and with a new government in place, promises abound, most of them made on camera and consequently under the full glare of the public spotlight.

The figures who now find themselves in the limelight would do well to gain perspective from the blunders made by the earlier government in this regard. The critics of the media call it irresponsible and decry the trend towards what they call speculation about Freudian slips made by politicians. The implication is that such stances are taken wilfully and knowingly by a needlessly aggressive media. This argument can hold true only as far as the individuals who feed media organisations, reporters, analysts and talk show hosts etc. At root, however, the news media operate as a collective whole which is about as wilfully damaging as a brick wall in the middle of the motorway — innocuous in itself but made deadly by context.

Given that the electronic media are a product of the Musharraf years, the power players in action today have no experience in dealing with the new reality. Most politicians and media organisations worked as allies during the so-called war against dictatorship but the honeymoon period is ending fast. The faces constituting the new government will soon find themselves at the receiving end of stern media criticism, at which point they will be faced with only two choices: attempt to lay arbitrary curbs, as was tried earlier, or learn to be media savvy: make considered moves and choose words carefully.

It will come down to this; it already has, if one reads into the recent suo motu notice taken against Geo News by the Supreme Court, and the initial (untenable) order that television channels get clearance from the court’s registrar before broadcasting programming related to the ‘judicial crisis.’

The media can only pick up statements that have been made on the record. It follows, therefore, that politicians both in and out of government must choose their words very carefully indeed. For example, the players lose no opportunity to deliver tasty soundbites about their commitment to free speech and a free media, accompanied by similarly well-sounding comments on the importance of an independent judiciary, an untainted Constitution and a relevant executive. But soundbites are by their nature shorn of real meaning and context: what exactly does ‘judicial independence’ or ‘media freedom’ refer to, for example, are these concepts to be guaranteed through legislation and will there be formal avenues of complaint in case of the abuses of power? If the chosen ones reduce complex issues to such buzzwords, they cannot then condemn the media for using the same buzzwords while pointing out that nothing is being done for judicial independence or demanding ‘true media freedom’.

Secondly, the decision-makers of today must recognise the fact that everything they say and do, each prevarication and U-turn, is at every stage beamed into millions of homes. People are watching constantly, and their memories are lengthened by the visual images made possible by the electronic media. Therefore, politicians may do well to remember that proverbially, familiarity breeds contempt. Having been brought closer to the people by the news channels, they must now work all the harder to retain their credibility.

The image of the agreement made at Bhurban, for example, is still fresh in everyone’s minds, flashed as it was on over two dozen channels for days on end. So when the deadline agreed upon by the two major players was not met, the sense of letdown was perhaps far greater than would have been the case if citizens had invested a mere five minutes of their time reading a newspaper story about the accord.

The genie is out of the bottle and our politicians, out in the cold as they have been for so long, must adapt their language and methods accordingly. Otherwise, it is inevitable that they will find themselves at logger-heads with the media which, being in its adolescent stages, will be increasingly tempted to fight dirty.

— hmumtaz@dawn.com