Among the sessions at the fifth LLF on Saturday was a discussion on fake news.

The panel including Ahmed Rashid, Nermeen Sheikh, Qasim Nauman and Max Rodenbeck discussed fake news especially in the background of the new American government.

“Trump uses this term in a self-aggrandising way,” said Nermeen Sheikh. “But despite everything many in America are now distrusting the media. We are inundated with information that tells us how to think.”

“The news necessitates certain erasures. There are always things that cannot be said and this is especially new in TV news… the media plays an important role in the turn of events and how audience understands and perceives events.”

“With someone like Trump he is a character rather than a politician and he himself was a TV host in the process of transitioning. Once he is ‘boxed in’ in his new position, he will automatically become less of a generator of fake news,” said Max Rodenbeck.

“There are two aspects to the fake news phenomenon. One is the old aspect. But the new aspect is that news is increasingly compartmentalised. For example there used to be three big networks but now there are so many. People can choose. There is a new media landscape. Technology can also help you choose.”

Ahmed Rashid said a new phenomenon of Twitter as a news platform was that politicians had taken to making statements online and no one could really question them anymore. From Trump to Modi and even in Pakistan, leaders were making statements on Twitter. “For a very long time now we have had no interpersonal briefing on national issues, nor have we had a press conference by the PM.”

ART IN THE AGE OF FASCISM: Another interesting conversation was with artist Molly Crabapple, titled Art in the Age of Fascism, moderated with Salima Hashmi.

Hasmi said that after Gen Zia came to power, protests at the Mall Road became a marker for artists in Pakistan concerning resistance against fascism.

In her speech, Molly condemned the kind of governance Trump stands for, but at the same time she also condemned all other authoritarian dictatorships all over the world. She described how important art was to resist fascism especially if it came out of the art circles and reached the real world across various strata.

CONVERSATION: Shabnam Ghosh was also at the LLF on her own in a conversation with Asghar Nadeem Syed. Shabnam remembered the time she was in the film industry.

“At that time we worked solely for the love of work, not for money,” she said. “We had good directors and producers and everyone was professional.”

She said she herself had done unglamorous roles like the one in ‘Aakhri Station’ where her role was that of a woman who only repeated one line throughout the film. She said it was a difficult role to play.

She remembered Nazrul Islam’s Aaina and Bandish and marked them as some of the best films she had worked in.

Published in Dawn, February 26th, 2017