DAMNED if they do and damned if they don’t. That was the situation the media once again found itself in on Monday when events in Karachi illustrated the kind of pressures it is subjected to in this country. Instigated by MQM chief Altaf Hussain’s speech in which he called for violence against various TV channels, the party’s activists attacked a building housing two television channels, damaging property and injuring security guards. The rioters set fire to vehicles and hurled stones at the police and TV cameramen present at the scene. One person — the MQM claims he was a party activist — died while several, including staffers at the news organisations, were injured. The ire expressed by the MQM supremo against the media was on account of his speeches not being covered. In September 2015, the Lahore High Court directed Pemra to ban reportage of Mr Hussain’s speeches and images, and until that order is successfully challenged, the electronic media has very little choice but to comply. Ironically however, that compulsion is the inverse — sans the violence — of what journalists have been subjected to at the hands of the MQM for years when it threatened them with dire consequences if they did not give ‘favourable’ coverage to the party. For implicit in the ban is a lack of understanding, across the board, of the media’s critical role in a democracy.

Unfortunately, shooting the messenger, the latest manifestation of which we saw on Monday, has long been a tradition in this country. That is almost invariably the case in states that have experienced long periods of military rule and where democratic traditions — media freedom being a central pillar of these — have but a tenuous hold. Where Pakistan is concerned, autocrats such as Gen Ziaul Haq, with his notoriously brutal treatment of journalists he considered recalcitrant, are not the only offenders. Parties that otherwise claim adherence to constitutional norms have also targeted media outlets they perceive as antagonistic to their aspirations, or remiss in their reporting of them. To cite but one of the more recent instances, in September 2014, Geo’s Islamabad offices repeatedly came under attack from supporters of the PTI during the party’s dharna in the capital. Even regulatory authorities such as Pemra have at times, specifically with reference to banned organisations, conflated the media’s responsibility of conveying information with ‘glorification’ of such entities and banned coverage entirely. Then there are the power centres that are aligned with the establishment. These are more opaque and unaccountable, a corollary of a quasi-democratic system and they also try to use the media to their advantage. The consequences of resistance can be deadly. And all this is not even counting the many militant groups for whom media personnel are fair game. Partly as a result of these many countervailing forces, the media’s oversight role has been compromised, a situation that ultimately works to the disadvantage of political parties that have a stake in the democratic system. For as the MQM has perhaps realised, objective coverage is far more preferable to none at all.

Published in Dawn, August 24th, 2016