THE ground has changed. So perhaps have the unwritten rules. In Pakistan today it is no longer government which chiefly influences or controls the press. The new censorship is altogether different and it comes in the form of special interests, big money and — dare one say it? — journalistic incompetence.

In Pakistan today the easiest thing to do is criticize the government, for sins real or imagined. Forget government, even army and the country’s all-powerful security services — ISI, MI and their poor cousin, IB — have lost holy cow status. Gen Musharraf personally has suffered more criticism at the hands of the press than all of Pakistan’s past rulers put together.

Indeed, open denunciation of the president, of government and government policies has lost both charm and novelty. The word dictatorship has lost its sting. In fact, coming across the usual criticism, I suspect the reader is tempted to turn the page.

Who could have foreseen this? That in Pakistan with its history of military rule and other variants of authoritarianism, the day would come when old-fashioned criticism would sound banal and hackneyed.

This is not to say all is for the best, for in place of the old curbs and restrictions have arisen new ones, some more insidious than the controls we were familiar with.

How many stories on corporate greed does the press normally carry? How many investigative stories have been done on the recent Karachi stock exchange crash which wiped out thousands of small investors? Snippets here and there may have appeared but nothing to hit the headlines. Why? Because newspapers tend not to write too much about the shenanigans of big money.

The property boom in Pakistan — with real estate prices in Lahore and Islamabad and Karachi, challenging prices anywhere in the world — is a potential scam in that much of the frenzied dealing is purely speculative, money being exchanged for land which, in many cases, exists only on paper. In the process, a few enterprising souls, selling not land but dreams, have become mega-billionaires.

Government having abdicated many of its other functions has also abdicated the responsibility of regulating the real estate sector. But the media too are guilty of omission. When was the last time an in-depth story appeared on the property boom and its pitfalls and ramifications?

Part of the problem of course is that the military too, with their defence housing authorities, are up to their necks in the property business. When prices go up, or rather through the roof as is the case at present, the benefits span the spectrum of the military class.

Hand it also to the property tycoons for having the sense to hire many high-ranking retired officers as front men, a formula for instant respectability. As if this wasn’t enough, the more enterprising of the real estate tycoons have become media persons by bringing out their own newspapers.

Most of the new TV channels coming up are owned by big business or corporate interests. In their talk shows the great punching bag is politics — government policy and performance of political parties. Corporate greed or the wheeling-dealing in the real estate sector seldom comes up for examination.

Car prices in Pakistan are a scandal. Even after paying the full amount there is a long wait before delivery. But not much is written on the subject because car advertising is important for newspaper revenues.

Advertising is the media’s oxygen. Regulating its supply, turning it up or down, is the new tool of control in the era of globalization. In this new environment, it is easier to criticize Musharraf or even the ISI, less easy to take on McDonald’s or KFC.

I’ve often wondered why when five-star hotel managers greet important guests, the resulting pictures get splashed in even the better newspapers. Goes to show the clout these hotels have.

When huge cement plants began to be set up in the Chakwal region — plants which, while drawing in investment, also threatened large-scale environmental damage — there were muted cries in one or two newspapers, then total silence as if a powerful hand had gagged the protests. The issue remains as pressing as ever but there’s not much mention of it anywhere. Talk of the power of big business.

It has been standard practice in Pakistan for governments to buy journalists, the information ministry and the secret services using ‘secret funds’ to keep selected members of the profession in good humour. (If the full list was ever released, many people would stop reading newspapers.)

The Punjab chief minister, Ch Pervaiz Elahi, must be credited with exceptionally good press management. This can be seen in the excellent press he regularly gets with many a well-known name in Urdu journalism singing his praises and extolling his extraordinary accomplishments. From some of the coverage you would think the subject was Bismarck and not Pervaiz Elahi.

A few days ago two different columns, a day or two apart, had a unified theme: that it wasn’t possible to do justice to all the development activity taking place in Punjab under Pervaiz Elahi’s dynamic leadership in a single column. Judging by the Punjab government’s frantic ad campaign in the media listing its achievements — alas, largely imaginary — in education, health, agriculture, livestock development, etc, it would appear it has its priorities about right: managing perceptions rather than touching reality. If ads alone could procure development, Punjab would be the most advanced place on the planet.

All governments, not to forget corporations, indulge in spin. All of us have a vested interest in sugar-coating reality, most of us wishing to appear better than we are. But this is spin on a grand scale. How much is it costing the Punjab exchequer? Foolish question. When hype is the ultimate objective expense is no consideration.

On the touchy subject of journalistic competence, it has to be said this is a profession for the lazy and the laid-back, most of us cheerfully promoting a cult of mediocrity, most reporters martyrs to the “he said/she said” school of newspaper coverage.

We are a statement-ridden nation in any case, leaders not saying what they have done, for the simple reason that they have done very little, but what heroic feats they are resolved to perform in the future. Politicians talk, shout and solemnly swear and newspapers faithfully report all this hot air.

Of American journalism in the first quarter of the last century the incomparable H. L. Mencken had this to say: “Most of the ills that continue to beset American journalism today, in truth, are not due to the rascality of owners nor even to the Kiwanian bombast of business managers, but simply and solely to the stupidity, cowardice and Philistinism of working newspaper men...There are reporters by the thousand who could not pass the entrance examination for Harvard or Tuskegee, or even Yale. It is this vast and militant ignorance, this widespread and fathomless prejudice against intelligence, that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar, and so generally disreputable.”

With minor amendments this judgment is equally applicable to Pakistani journalism.

This is a sad state of affairs. Whether Pakistani journalism, print and media, has come of age or not, it is better paid than it used to be in the dark ages. With the growth of the media, especially the proliferation of TV channels, it now offers, to those with some aptitude, a reasonably good career.

Remember also the excitement journalism has to offer. Which are the truly exciting professions? Politics once upon a time but, in the era of military-controlled democracy, no longer. Big money, yes, provided you have it, or you have a job like Shaukat Aziz’s at Citibank. Showbiz and modelling but how many can enter their sacred portals?

That leaves journalism. If you have some talent you can rise to the top easily because of the paucity of talent in our republic as a whole. If you are reasonably literate, have some kind of presence, can string a few sentences together without breaking the back of English grammar, and have read a few books, there is nothing to stop you from becoming a ‘pundit’ or, better still, a professor of the airwaves.