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April 28, 2005
The media game
In all fairness, this piece should not be titled “Off the rack” because the news that is discussed here was broken not by a conventional newspaper or magazine but by online media, or what is known simply as new media. A more appropriate caption, perhaps, would be “Off the net.”
This is what transpired: During an off-the-record panel discussion on January 28, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, CNN’s top news executive, Eason Jordan, made the extraordinary claim that 12 journalists working in Iraq had been targeted and killed deliberately by American troops.
Taken aback, one of the panellists — Democrat Barney Frank of Massa-chusetts — asked Jordan if his news organization had reported this. “No,” said Jordan.
One of the participants then asked him if he had evidence to back up his claim. Now, Jordan began backtracking. The panellists, after discussing the issue of journalists’ safety for a while, moved on to other topics.
Print and television journalists, present at the discussion, did not cover it because it was strictly not for “public consumption”. Undeterred, however, Rony Abovitz, a panellist, who had been maintaining a weblog wrote in detail about Jordan’s claim.
Abovitz’s log — headlined Do US troops target journalists in Iraq? — quickly became the most sought after article by bloggers. The story soon gathered momentum and mainstream media, too, started discussing it, culminating in Jordan tendering his resignation from his CNN post.
Regarding this, Gary Younge of The Guardian wrote: “… Jordan’s demise may be much more significant than it first appears. In particular, it has been hailed as a victory of new technology over the old.”
Elsewhere, Younge wrote: “Where the Internet was once regarded as providing a potential check on the mainstream media it has now in some cases, usurped it — being free from the restraints of editorial meetings, ethical codes, deadlines, schedules and production costs.”
Jordan’s story, admittedly, is not the first one underlying the growing influence of the new media. After all, since at least five years, it’s common knowledge that the world’s best newspapers’ circulation, including The Guardian and Washington Post, is on a steady decline. The reason being growing popularity of both online and satellite media.
Traditionally, the British have been reading newspapers in considerable numbers. According to a study, over the last decade and a half the combined circulation of print newspapers published in Britain has been declining steadily. The total circulation being just 80 per cent of what it was in 1990.
The World Association of Newspaper’s (WAN) World Press Trends 2001 report notes: “The circulation for daily newspapers has been falling for several years now in the US, EU and Japan. The story is essentially the same in the former two: circulation has fallen as younger generations fail to pick up the daily habit of reading a newspaper.” Circulation also continues to fall in Australia and other industrialized regions.
According to WAN, the Internet’s rapid rise occurred simultaneously with this newsprint circulation decline several years ago. The Internet, the fastest growing medium in history, was used by more than 500 million people in 2000.
Now, let me put some simple questions to you. Aren’t Pakistani newspapers, much like their British counterparts, likely to face difficult times in the future? What are the newspapers here doing to ward off possible decline in circulations? Shouldn’t some changes be made in the style in which newspapers present news, particularly when satellite channels are telecasting news bulletins 24 hours a day?
Western newspapers, knowing fully well that they cannot beat the satellite channels to a particular piece of information, especially if it’s of the ‘breaking news’ type, have started analyzing and commenting upon the various events that often get disseminated many hours before the morning edition of a paper gets released. So, it often happens that information about something which happens on a Saturday evening is disseminated that same evening by the new media while Sunday's morning newspapers analyze the whys and hows of the event.
In contrast, the Pakistani newspapers still present news items in the old, archaic style of report writing. Newspaper editors perhaps think that if reporters were given the freedom to analyze things they would start producing biased and prejudiced reports. Such fears, however, could be totally unfounded.
The newspapers, in my opinion, should realize that the new media would always remain oriented towards breaking news and that they would spend little effort on analyzing events. The fact that they have nothing equivalent to a newspaper’s lead comments or editorials gives credence to this view.
So, the newspapers need not match the new media in the breaking news category. Instead, they should look for exclusives elsewhere. These areas can be that of the social sector, particularly education and health. Most news channels, and newspapers, too, give too much importance to politics, leaving out many important social issues.
Should Pakistani newspapers start undertaking such work for the sole purpose of survival in the marketplace, then they would be rendering a great service to Pakistani journalism and its people. But who will take up the challenge? That’s the question.
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