ALLOW me to indulge myself and give one column over to the bee that I’ve got in my bonnet: viz, the so-called ‘breaking news’ that is flashed so enthusiastically and so often on our television screens.

I realise that Pakistan is a country of many and myriad upheavals.

Sometimes the upheavals are merely part of this country’s unfortunate cyclical history and can be lumped under the heading of more of the same, examples ranging all the way from the tedious (“President dissolves parliament, announces emergency” and “Ayub/Yahya/Zia/Musharraf/dictator of the month takes over, cites national interest”) to the mundane (“Inflation and unemployment reach epic proportions” and “Country brought to standstill by power/sugar/water riots”).

More of the same though such news may be, we talk about it anyway as though it were entirely unexpected, shocking and perverse. On some notable occasions, the crises merit national headlines and do truly reflect a slight change in the pattern — “Armed men attack Aaj TV offices” and “Garhi Khuda Baksh awaits another Bhutto” (no one said that the change would be positive).

But the last time I checked, even Pakistan had not reached a point where there was a new bit of ‘breaking news’ to report every other minute.

Yet that is precisely what the local television news channels would have us believe. Surf through their fare at any hour of the day, any day of the week, and you can be sure that somewhere there will be a flashing red ticker announcing ‘Breaking news.’ Your heart will skip a beat and you’ll squint at the screen — only to find that the story, important though it may well be, will often concern something quite undeserving of being labelled ‘breaking news,’ such as the lawyers’ caravan reaching Rawalpindi peacefully or Naveed Qamar calling the budget ‘pro-poor.’

If the electronic media were a grand banquet prepared for a hundred million voracious news consumers, there would be a special dish on the menu all the time, sometimes created with likely-looking ingredients found at hand and at other times, old hat presented as something new, like scrambled eggs being flogged as oeufs brouillés.

Furthermore, even if a piece of information is significant enough to merit being announced as ‘breaking news,’ it cannot remain so for ever. After a relatively short period of time, it has to be demoted to being merely the lead story. By credible news organisations around the world, ‘breaking news’ is labelled as such for only the first half hour or hour of it being reported, usually when all that’s available of the story are its bare bones. “Massive earthquake hits China, untold numbers dead” is breaking news. By the time we have the details – the magnitude of the tremor, the rescue operations underway, the grief of the victims – it is the lead. A story may remain the top headline for days but that does not necessarily mean that it can still be referred to as ‘breaking news.’

So why have Pakistan’s news channels fallen into the trap of confusing breaking news with top stories? For one thing, the electronic media were born virtually out of nowhere and virtually all at the same time. It follows, therefore, that all vie desperately – often by any means possible – for viewers’ attention. In popular lexicon, a channel’s credibility and the quality of its news-gathering net is judged by the number of scoops or big stories it breaks. And while this is a perfectly reasonable yardstick, it is all too easy for producers to be seduced by the ease with which they can tot up the ‘breaking news’ score by simply applying the label wherever possible. “Lawyers embark upon long march” is by no means breaking news, but announcing it as such allows the channel to add another notch on its belt.

Then there is the problem of a mutually competitive environment, and who has the courage to take the first deep breath of rationality. If 20 channels present a certain story as ‘breaking news,’ will the 21st have the fortitude to dispense with the flashing red ticker and calmly present it as the top story of the day? The situation is not unlike that where children feed off each others’ hyperactivity and egg each other on to worsening behaviour.

News channels must at some point wake up to the fact that while refusing to give in to alarmist reporting may initially be a risk, it could also go a long way towards bolstering credibility in the future — particularly given that so many ‘breaking news’ stories in recent months have later been proved to have been based on rumour or unverified facts.

Lastly, there is the issue of manpower. Before the explosion in televised news, there were a number of mature print news organisations but collectively, there was nowhere near the number of trained journalists as was required to fill the channel slots. As a result, as far as the local channels are concerned, for every one person with journalistic experience, there are three who are fresh in the field. Obviously, then, there will be confusions.

No news editor – no matter how hoary and steeped in news ethics – can himself juggle all the tasks involved. Sometimes, all it takes is an inexperienced copyeditor to mess things up, or a reporter who does not know the difference between parliament being prorogued and closing its session for the day.

The only way out lies in self-regulation by those who collectively give a channel its ‘look’: all the way from the owners and editors to the copywriters and newsreaders. There has been much ado in past months about external media regulatory bodies and laws on what can and cannot be reported, and in what manner. But such steps are not ultimately viable because they cannot help but serve as limitations on the freedom of the press. And given that press freedom is a goal worth reaching, it then follows that press organisations must themselves learn to tell the difference between ethical reporting and alarmism or scandal-mongering. After all, as was pointed out with reference to the Danish cartoons that many people found insulting, press freedom does not mean that you can mendaciously cry “fire” in a crowded theatre.

—hmumtaz@dawn.com