KARACHI: “We don’t control, we regulate,” said Kamaluddin Tipu, acting chairman of the Pakistan Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) while delivering a guest lecture on ‘Media Ethics’, organised by the Department of Media Studies and Social Sciences of Sindh Madressatul Islam University in its auditorium on Tuesday.

“Though Pakistan Television doesn’t come under us, the rest of the media, cable TV, FM radios, landing rights for foreign channels, etc, are all regulated by Pemra. We issue licences, though we haven’t done it for a channel since 2010, we look at complaints and we give choice to the people in a country where there is no media policy,” he said.

“Yes, there are over 80 different laws but no media policy. Therefore when asked to do something, Pemra is confused. It’s just like the judges still being undecided on whether Manto wrote obscene stuff or not. There is no black or white there,” he said.

Mr Tipu while mentioning the development process that took place in the formation of code of conduct for the media at Pemra, said that so far no consensus on the code of conduct had been built due of divergence of views. He further said that Pemra, following its own code of conduct, upheld national interests and it was clear about norms, values, national interests, terrorism, personal and social rights, beliefs and other such matters related to the citizens of the country.

Throwing more light on the type of complaints normally received by Pemra, Mr Tipu said they get things such as some actress or anchorwoman not covering their head, someone maybe smoking openly on some show. “Again, there are so many viewpoints, so many grey areas that cannot be defined easily. But you have the remote control, which gives you a choice, so change channels. We won’t close down a channel on small complaints such as these. As long as they are not making fun of Islamic values, it is okay,” he said.

“In developed countries, there is a prime time. Not here. Before prime time, there is children’s time, but not here. Some advertisements have Indian actresses, too. When people here started having an issue about that, the ad agencies started making two versions, one for our audience and one for Indian audiences,” he informed.

More issues, according to the Pemra head include regulatory conflicts such as allowing six per cent of Indian content, four per cent international content. “But more people want Indian content,” he said. “Still the government allows Indian movies to be shown in theatres but not on the channels. This restricts the poor people’s viewership as the rich ones can go watch the movies in theatres. Pemra faces that conflict as well,” he added.

“As far as the media here is concerned, there are a lot of grey areas. The media is also very powerful. In fact, the main sources of power in Pakistan are the bureaucracy, feudalism, the judiciary, and now the media, too. The media is feeling its power so it likes to dictate, which is something that needs to be controlled. It wants complete freedom as it is commercial and wants to make money,” he said.

“Still there are things we don’t want them to air such as blood, dead bodies, etc. There is a requirement of airing live shows with an eight-second delay mechanism but most channels do not abide by this as when Shaikh Rashid comes on a channel he says all kinds of things and the ratings go up. They don’t want him censored. The ratings are also not done by Pemra.”

Mr Tipu explained: “Pemra only came about in March 2002. Before that if you owned a print media, you couldn’t have a TV channel. Because of that you were given landing rights where the channel was airing somewhere out of the country like the UAE. But that all changed in 2007 when Pemra was revamped with some laws changed.”

Earlier, Vice Chancellor of Sindh Madressatul Islam University Prof Dr Muhammad Ali Shaikh, welcomed the guests.

Published in Dawn, August 19th, 2015

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