November 10, 2005

I still cannot get over the image of a woman dying on AAJ TV, a week after the Oct. 8 earthquake. She was injured during the initial tremor and her home was in a village close to Muzaffarabad but across the river. A reporter and a cameraman had reached the village, in an apparent effort to show the world that, contrary to many claims being made, the government and the army had not been able to reach many remote villages. The woman needed urgent medical help, her family waited for days but no help came. And, as the camera rolled, her life began to slip away, with her family members reciting the Kalima. The camera panned to the foreground and one of the dying woman’s male relatives began to offer the reporter and the cameraman some tea. It all seemed quite tragic and very surreal. The channel then cut back to the studio, where the anchor, Talat Hussain seemed quite distraught himself and said “I think we need to take a break,” after which a commercial was aired.

This scene caused many viewers to express their indignation at what the channel had done. They reasoned that if the reporting crew had managed to reach the village then it could have easily taken along with them a medical team. However, this ignores the fact that the primary job of journalists covering a disaster is reporting it, and hence it would not have made sense for the TV channel crew to take a team of doctors along with them.

The same channel on the night of Oct. 26 was showing footage of a group of villagers in a remote AJK valley which had not been delivered any aid or relief, even after a passage of 18 days since the quake hit. Another channel, the Pushto language AVT Khyber, has done a novel thing. At night it often shows unedited and running footage of various affected areas without any voice-over commentary. This is certainly different from what most of the other channels have been showing, with their correspondents and news anchors often injecting quite a lot of commentary of their own.

Unfortunately, some of the coverage, complete with close-up shots of dying or maimed survivors, many of them children, and accompanied by mournful singing could have been avoided as could have been the many clerics who have suddenly emerged and have been invited by some of the channels as ‘earthquake experts’. The problem with the latter approach is that instead of acting in a practical and responsible fashion by trying to focus on matters like non-adherence to any prescribed building code or examining government corruption which led to the construction of so many substandard government schools and colleges (and a disproportionately high number of deaths of children and teenagers), viewers were being told repeatedly - by these self-appointed ‘experts’ of course - that the reason for the quake was because the country’s moral mooring was being led astray.

Notwithstanding the fact that such insinuations were the last thing that the quake’s survivors would want to hear considering the large numbers of innocent children who have died, such remarks have a political angle as well because the dislike among the more religious-minded in the country of the current government’s policies is well-established. One MMA MPA from the NWFP even criticized ISPR spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan on the floor of the assembly, citing a newspaper interview given by the general, for not fasting on the day of the quake. It should not be anybody’s business whether another person is fasting or not, because that is a personal matter. However, remarks such as what the MMA MPA made remind us of the sharp fall in tolerance levels in Pakistani society over the years.

Despite these drawbacks, it has to be said that credit goes to the private TV channels for bringing - for the first time ever - a tragedy of epic proportions right into the living rooms of Pakistanis. PTV was slow to start off but it seems to have done an okay job, especially its ‘Lifeline’ segment hosted by Tauseeq Haider which gives out practical information, allows relatives looking for missing survivors to post messages and vice versa.

Now that the emphasis will be on reconstruction and rehabilitation, perhaps the focus should switch to what is needed, and where. To that end, it would be good if every day of the week an hour or two of programming was set aside for that. Web-sites like www.earthquakepakistan.org (run by the Federal Relief Commission and with extensive links and a valuable database of contact numbers of those in the field) or www.risepak.com also need to be publicized more on the electronic media. Also, recent developments - especially reports that women and children may have been abducted by human traffickers - need to be investigated in some detail.

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