A Stab in the Back

Journalism is the dark side of professional life, a mugger waiting for you in an alleyway with a sock full of sand — before you know what’s what, you’re crawling around looking for your teeth. It’s also like the mob: once you’re in, you can never truly get out. The work constitutes a tide of words and information that can drag you helplessly along like a leaf in a whirlpool. But if you’re good, you can surf the crest, finding balance on the edge of the catastrophe curve where a journalist thrives.

Everyone reads the newspapers, but few know what goes on behind the scenes. What really makes journalists and their profession tick? Secrets of the Press lifts the veil – or rather, clears a path, hands waving, through the fug of smoke and alcohol, secrecy and cynicism – to reveal the bones: the excitement, the frustration, the adrenaline rush of the scoop and the pressure, but most of all, the sheer fun. Edited by Stephen Glover, one of the founders of the Independent and the founding editor of the Independent on Sunday, the book is a collection of 27 essays by some of the grandest old hacks of British journalism. Don’t be fooled by its rather sensationalist title – that too is in the best traditions of journalism, after all. Secrets of the Press presents the murky, heady world of journalism as understood by those on the inside; insightful, colourful and nearly always irreverent. This book is a must read for anyone who’s worked in or been interested in the field.

Let’s start with the editor, the enigmatic, often bad tempered, caustic face of any publication. Freelance writer and the London editor of Vanity Fair magazine Henry Porter estimates that he has worked with some thirty different editors and his views on the breed are recorded in the brilliantly titled essay, ‘Editors and Egomaniacs.’ There are two types of editors, we learn. First, the “shirt-sleeved, seat-of-the-pants technicians” who rise through the ranks of sub-editors and rely on a sure, experienced eye and a sharp news instinct. Then there is the other sort who “sees himself as an altogether more rational creature.” Porter dismisses this lot as having little technical experience but secure in the belief that they “offer something supposedly much grander – leadership, a world view, an intellectual analysis, a moral compass.” It seems that seminal to the job is the ability to form unshakeable opinions and stick to them. “A newspaper editor must be opinionated,” writes Porter, “if only to give his paper direction and identity. His views may add up to little more than a collection of prejudices, but they are better than no views at all, or an outlook which is just too reasonable or too damned nice.”

Being the editor is a dance with the devil, for it is at this Valhalla that the buck finally stops – and as an editor-in-the-making pointed out, few things are as likely to generate a god-complex, with its associated evils. “Once an editor has served in the job for a few years, his grip on reality tends to degenerate,” writes Porter. “The unhinging is in part due to the excessive preoccupation of an editor’s mind, which churns endlessly with the business of the paper, but also with the insatiable appetite for novelty. All life is raw material for his publication and when it doesn’t quite match his Technicoloured expectations, he is liable to demand that his staff do something about it. . . Cut off from normal life by the rigours of the job and surrounded by people who almost never tell him the truth, the editor is liable to form some very strange ideas about his own abilities and importance.”

As for the idealists who want the press to create a better world, Porter has a single, caustic comment: a newspaper campaign can only succeed if it has a definite goal which there is some hope of reaching. A newspaper agitating to save the dolphins or increase deciduous planting is hopelessly misguided, he states flatly, “because there is no natural end to the mission – an editor can never declare that there are enough dolphins or oak trees in the world.” Only start a newspaper crusade if you can be seen to win it and win it well.

Turning to the increasing demand for women in journalism, Secrets of the Press has Zoe Heller – a prominent features’ writer and columnist – warning new entrants about the “ghetto” of “women’s writing.” This, she says, is comprised of three categories: “the good-humoured ‘home front’ column in which a woman writes in a jolly, eye-rolling way about her accident-prone kids and lazy husband. (‘Mum – Johnny’s stuck a marble up his nose!’) There is the stern comment piece, in which public affairs are examined from an admonitory, feminist point of view. (‘When was the last time the Foreign Secretary changed a nappy?’) And then there is the daffy ‘girl’ piece, in which a youngish, single female confides the vagaries of her rackety personal life. (‘Never try shaving your legs in a moving taxi.’)”

The problem lies in a male-dominated field trying to ascribe areas of female interest. “Why is a woman columnist honour bound to write about abortion rights?” asks Heller. “The problem with writing ‘as a woman’ is not just that you are inevitably burdened with the world’s views on how you should represent your sex,” but that editors (mostly male) will hire women to write ‘as a woman’ or from a female perspective. And if you take on that role, Heller warns, “you are required to pretend that your femaleness is all – that every one of your opinions is refracted through the lens of gender.”

Petronella Wyatt presents a similar view – and this is a woman who, as one of her first assignments in the mid-1990s for the Sunday Telegraph, was instructed to repair to a London gentlemen’s club and pinch the members’ bottoms. (Her editor had this brainwave after newspapers splashed a story about a male hospital patient who had been sued for pinching a nurse’s bottom.) Wyatt observes that for many female journalists, early dreams of, say, political reporting, are aborted simply because their physical appearance deems them, in the editors’ eyes, better suited to other tasks. “Being a certain sort of female journalist can be a blessing and a curse,” she writes. “A blessing because it undoubtedly opens doors; a curse because the doors frequently open on to a cul-de-sac.”

Young reporters, even in the University of the Punjab’s journalism curriculum, are taught the ‘five Ws’ of the game: Who? What? Where? When? and Why? The cliché was given a twist in a sketch on the ‘Spitting Image’ TV show: three pigs with ‘Press’ cards, crying, “Whose round is it? What are we havin’? Where’s the pub? When’s it open?” and “Why don’t we have another one?” It’s true that traditionally, a hack without a drink is like a wingless eagle – or, if you prefer, a hairless dog, as Francis Wheen writes. And Secrets of the Press reminds one of the glorious days when the Prisoners of the Fleet drank at places with names such as Stab in the Back.

— hmumtaz@dawn.com

No ray of hope on Pakistan sports horizon

Almost all major sports in Pakistan are experiencing major decline as the new head of state Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani are unable to address the main issues affecting sports due to bigger, more important challenges that have been confronting the country.

Incidentally, Zardari is the patron-in-chief of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) while Gilani enjoys a similar position in the Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF).

Files started compiling the day PCB chairman Dr Nasim Ashraf, a close aide of Musharraf, called it a day while following the footsteps of the Army ruler and subsequently creating a vacuum.

On the other hand, Zafarullah Jamali is still at the helm of affairs in the PHF despite debacle at the Beijing Olympics last month.

He is, however, finding it difficult to save his skin after all of his colleagues packed up with the exception of incumbent secretary Asif Bajwa who assumed power through ‘connections’ few days before the China sojourn.

It was reported that Jamali called on the Prime Minister on return from Beijing and instead of being asked to step down, he was rewarded 20 million rupees for the cash-strapped PHF.

Taking advantage of the situation, the bureaucrats in the ministry and the PSB started playing their shots which further created a mess. The latter disaffiliated Pakistan Billiards and Snooker Association (PBSA), the Shootingball Federation and the Adventure Federation for violating two-term clause of the National Sports Policy.

Wasting no time, the PBSA conducted its election and brought in new faces replacing the old guards and they, too, are awaiting re-affiliation.

The Federal Sports Minister, Najamuddin Khan, is making headlines these days. On the one hand, he has vowed to enforce National Sports Policy in letter and spirit and cleansed the National Sports Federations (NSF) from mafia, and on the other, he has taken control of the lucrative PCB by making an amendment in their constitution.

A number of people including former Test greats and non-technocrats are in the run for the prized vacant slot of the PCB chairman. The sports minister also seems to be an aspirant for the post as the recent move suggests.

Apart from cricket and hockey, the cat and mouse game between Pakistan Squash Federation (PSF) and former world No 1 Jansher Khan is going on since long and they continue to level allegations and counter allegations against each other for the declining standard.

Then there’s a sub committee of the Senate standing committee on sports which used to grill top hierarchies of different federations, the POA etc. Initially, people had a lot of faith in the committee but they are perturbed as its findings have so far failed to see the light of the day.

Each and every discipline has witnessed drastic decline during the last two decades but no remedial measures have been adopted to arrest it. People come and go by making tall claims but it is yet to be seen that who will bell the cat?

A grave tale from local ‘Arlington’

IT IS instructive that only last week in this space one had written about a heightened state of insecurity governing the lives of Islamabad’s residents and the inability of the government to do anything about it.

To be sure, even as the federal capital recoiled from a spree of sovereignty-puncturing hot pursuits up north — the president was off to a private visit to Dubai and London within the first week of his oath-taking!

Within hours of his much-awaited inaugural address to the parliament’s joint session last Saturday, Islamabad was again left wondering about the fragments of the much-touted khappe (prosper) slogan.

The frozen frame of debris at the Marriott Hotel resting on a pronounced security failure and lack of leadership is unnerving to say the least.

The obvious question is — what is in store for the current generation of Islamabad, especially children, who are growing up in an atmosphere you wouldn’t wish on your enemies.

After more than four decades of peace and tranquility, the likes of which evoked sarcasm with references like the city appearing to be “half the size of Arlington cemetery and twice as dead”, the fable is fast unraveling.

While Islamabad has expanded to become the most prized living space in Pakistan in terms of location and environment — denuding of the green belt notwithstanding — it is rapidly losing those assets to terrorist.

In fact, five suicide bombings and two other blasts since January 2007 have served to expand the size of the local ‘Arlington’, leaving grave question marks over what it portends for its insecurity-plagued residents.

It is too early to read into the genesis of what is the single biggest act of terror in Islamabad’s history but given the symbolic significance, it is pregnant with the potential to shake the foundations of the state.

A few ponderables are inescapable. To begin with, the government was conspicuous by its absence a good hundred minutes into the shocking explosion.

The irony lay in how Prime Minister’s Adviser on Interior Rehman Malik boasted after the presidential address that his government had a firm handle on security issues.

That the cream of political, military and administrative leadership was in the middle of an Iftar get-together at the Prime Minister’s House at the time of the suicide hit begs introspection.

The convergence of a critical mass of the top leadership at one single place in times of great uncertainty and present and clear danger to the lives of high-profile figures was clearly a less than bright idea.

The breach of security was palpable and will, no doubt, haunt the government in the days to come. But for the perturbed citizens of the capital, the concerns are manifold.

Not only do they remain a soft target — for the obvious reason that terrorists usually zero in on public places for maximum damage — but the fear that if the masters of their destiny were unable to prevent episodes like the Marriott carnage in a supposedly high security zone, what chance do the lesser mortals stand of escaping a precision attack.

In times of distress like these, a government is supposed to be the agent of assurance. But what Islooites are seeing is, to begin with, an acute lack of credibility thanks to dubious pronouncements by its security czars.

For instance, Rehman Malik told the media that the president and PM were supposed to dine at the Marriott but pulled out only at the last minute.

His claim was completely denied by the hotel management and a printed invitation card also gave a lie to it, where the first venue (Parliament House) was cut out by a line drawn on it and replaced with PM House, where the get-together was eventually held.

Also, of concern, is the spectacular failure of the government’s disaster management skills. There have been seven blasts in the capital in less than two years apart from the Margalla Towers collapse in the catastrophic earthquake in 2005.

And yet, whatever disaster management tools that the city administration had been bandying about have been a virtual disaster.

But the cost goes beyond the loss of lives and material damage.

As a parent, one is wary of the haunting images and psychological scars left by these soul-destroying occurrences on children growing up in Islamabad. One shudders to think what the future holds for them — even more than what it does us.

The writer is News Editor at Dawn News. He may be contacted at

kaamyabi@gmail.com