“THE market was small and the battle was for survival not for comfort or luxury,” was the answer from an ustad, a former teacher, journalist and politician to the questions that are being asked frequently these days: why can’t the journalists unite today and how did ‘we’ in the past manage to wage joint fights for our rights?

Yet more questions… Who are we and how are we related to the journalists of the past and their struggles? Are we the heirs to the journalists of bygone times who despite their differences had the capacity to see reason in mounting a collective front when a crisis so dictated? Or are we an altogether different breed with our own principles?

The ustad quoted above had been involved in gainful struggles that united journalists, and his assertion about what might have forced closing of ranks back then indicates that unfortunately the media professionals of today do not quite look at the present situation as a crisis threatening their survival.

They are too engrossed in the affairs of their livelihood. They fear putting at stake too much if they were to commit themselves to a campaign for rights. They are fully entrenched in their comfort zones away from the past afflictions and concerns, having arrived here through a process that was not without its guidelines.

It’s been a while since the struggle for wages and better working conditions that essentially brought the journalists together was almost given up. In the words of a veteran it was essentially and initially this cause that encouraged alliances across boundaries. The journalists of today, he says, cannot react in the manner they were once able to because the structure that sustained such an alliance across ideological and group divides exists no more. It has been destroyed in the interest of business.

A journalistic alliance across ideological divides exists no more.

For a long time, recall old trade unionists, journalists were able to overcome their differences for a cause that they could share with others from the profession. Until 1970, that alliance was more or less intact. The journalists became more vulnerable to toeing the lines of various political parties with the passage of time and this created new divides as well as sharpening the old lines, ideological and others.

Common causes were increasingly difficult to find let alone jointly pursued. The trade union was badly marred by groupings, and when the new standards for operating a media house were introduced towards the 1990s, the journalists were not as potent a force as they once were.

These new standards thrived in exclusivity, and fed on divisions in the newspaper industry. The journalist, basically because of the compulsions imposed by the wage award, had to be separated from other workers in the industry. These other workers were those who had provided much strength and substance to the drive for rights in the past. This segregation where two people working in a paper could actually be employed by two different companies created yet more factions with their own complexes and their own suspicions of each other. The two have gone their own respective ways for quite a while now, making reconciliation and a partnership most difficult.

Also, the changing circumstances weakened the trade unions of workers in other areas which had once stood by the journalists. It was a mutually beneficial relationship where the journalists reciprocated the unions outside their profession by actively sharing their concerns and helping them with their campaign.

The new system severed that bond and sought to break the whole into groups and was quite effective in debilitating the worker per se. It is the inevitable fallout of that process that we today see very few trade union activities covered in the newspapers.

Actually, the helplessness betrayed by those who call for the restoration of a journalists’ trade union is a reflection of the desperation workers unions in general must have felt at not getting the support they once took for granted from the media and other actors in the system.

The workers the media abandoned in its newfound love for the smooth-running market have been through the period that now confronts the conscientious media people with all its stark realities.

These workers, reduced to small factions, have for many years now, found themselves on the wrong end of the bargain, but rarely has their case been pleaded by the media — because of clashing corporate interests that are often justified in the name of the smooth running of the economy. And it is this business as usual that defines the attitude of journalists belonging to this and that faction or group during the current infighting in the media. 

The modern newsroom it appears does not take too kindly to any disruptive elements that are still bent upon invoking the protest mode as their right. On a particularly unsettling day they would be inclined to run the story how a demonstration caused a traffic jam on a big city road rather than delve too deep into the reasons and pain behind the demonstration itself.

There can be no partial restoration of the unease that characterised and nourished the old journalist we crave in trying times such as these. The revival has to be routed through a rethink outside our comfort zone populated by workers who we have ignored so much at the cost of our own identity.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2014