Like the tabloid press the world over, many of our TV channels love to sensationalise. They go to any extreme to have an edge over their competitors and in the process stoop, or rather attempt to conquer.

The last time I met Zamir Niazi, the man who wrote three bold and thought-provoking books on the curbs on freedom of expression and never ceased to discuss in-depth the subject in different forums, I suggested that the time was ripe for him to throw light on the misuse of the freedom of expression. He responded by saying that the subject had been brewing in his mind for quite sometime, and that he was planning to write at length on it.

But as bad luck would have it, shortly after that meeting Zamir Niazi passed away. One can be sure that meticulous and fair-minded that he was he would have come out with a balanced work on the subject, much to the embarrassment of some of his colleagues in the profession. He had enough archival material to back his viewpoint.

It is so unfortunate that Niazi didn’t have the time to present the other side of the picture. He would have told us that authority without responsibility is meaningless and perilous to society and the country as a whole.

Many a time we have seen a story with a slant appearing in a newspaper, which may be the result of the vested interest of the writer (or reporter) or a result of a ‘team work’, if I may use the term. One can accept a slant when the newspaper or a magazine is a mouthpiece of a political party, but when a publication professes to be neutral then slants cannot be justified. It amounts to violating the readers’ trust.

Our journalists often suffer from selective amnesia. For instance, I haven’t seen one reporter at Mian Nawaz Sharif’s press conference reminding him how unceremoniously he had removed a chief justice during his tenure as the country’s prime minister and it was in that period that some hoodlums attacked the apex court. No one was punished thus leaving no doubt who had backed them. Today the gentleman is asking for the restoration of the deposed judges.

When they want, our friends in the media can be very abrasive, particularly when they are interviewing people on television. One doesn’t have to cross the limits of civility if one wants to be frank and forthright. It seems that most interviewers want to be Tim Sebastians without realising how much homework is done by him and by his team of researchers before the guest faces the camera.

Very seldom do we get to watch on our TV the kind of interview that one saw of Pervez Musharraf on DawnNews. One could not help noticing the rising discomfort level of the president because the interviewer asked some searching questions without crossing the norms of decency and good manners.

Like the tabloid press the world over, many of our TV channels love to sensationalise. They go to any extreme to have an edge over their competitors and in the process stoop to conquer, or rather attempt to conquer. A reporter of a leading news channel crossed all limits of decency when he almost thrust the mike into the mouth of a child rape victim as he asked her what her feelings were when she was being subjected to rape. Mind you, like many stories, this was repeated in every news bulletin that evening, which meant that the shift in charge in the newsroom was also a party to a flagrant violation of the ethics of journalism where the name and the identity of not just the victim but also her close relatives are not divulged.

Not all irresponsible stories in print and on the electronic media are so designed intentionally most of them are results of the writer’s inability or unwillingness to verify all aspects of the story.

I distinctly remember an afternoon bulletin on BBC, which while breaking the news of sniper shootings in Karachi, sometime in the ‘90s, reported that ‘the graveyards were overflowing’. In those days innocent people were targeted morning, noon and night and the casualties were to the tune of seven or eight per day. On the day the BBC newscaster reported the ‘overflowing of the graveyards’ the casualties had entered double figures. Strangely it didn’t occur to the news editor that in a mega city where thousands die of natural causes every day, the mere addition of 10 additional deaths cannot result in the overflowing of graveyards. I could not watch the next hour’s bulletin to confirm whether the faux pas was subsequently deleted or it wasn’t. It did, however, strengthen my belief that only bad news is good news for the western media, even in the case of a widely respected TV channel.

All said, we have to realise that those who oppose censorship ought to believe in self-censorship too, and this is true of all media, including print and electronic.