DHARNAS, rallies, ‘long marches’ — street agitation is in full swing in Pakistan. This is a strange phenomenon in a country that has been wracked by terrorist violence for over a decade and has had its public spaces colonised by fear. And yet, rarely does a winter pass without a sit-in somewhere in the country.

The prevalence of the mainstream media may partly explain this paradox. The performative element of such agitations — the fact that they have an audience that extends beyond those assembled at a particular space in time — seems to drive their frequency and intensity.

It is normally difficult to sustain a sit-in. Protesters are unclear about the expectations from them, and may feel that their efforts are not recognised. The exercise may seem futile as several days pass and their demands are not met.

Where does reportage end and public relations begin?

But add a television crew to the mix and suddenly the sit-in has potency. Each moment of protest is witnessed, enhancing its power. Efforts are acknowledged. Participants are kept abreast of developments such as leadership demands and negotiations, which drives motivation. The hankering for 15 minutes of fame is fed by media interviews with protesters and camera pans that offer the possibility that family members back home will catch a glimpse of participants engaged in the oh-so-important business of agitation.

In late October, an eight-day preamble near D-Chowk fizzled out owing to the lack of media coverage. One wonders how effective the TLYRA’s renewed efforts would have been if the DSNGs never showed up.

This leads to difficult questions for the media and its regulators. Where does reportage end and public relations begin? What constitutes journalism as opposed to facilitation? When is the press informing the public, and when is it serving an agenda?

The answer lies in proportionate and contextualised coverage of protest — unfortunately, the rarest commodities in a competitive, ratings-driven and immature media landscape.

Proportionality and context fall victim to the fact that it is low-cost in terms of energy and resources to cover a protest — send a team and let the cameras role. More context would mean less coverage of the protest, and more of the drivers, actors, their motives, and the implications of their actions. Less airtime and more context would likely take the steam out of most agitations, revealing demands to be cynical or ridiculous or making protesters liable for their actions. Nothing kills the buzz of agitation like accountability.

The 24/7 news cycle also thrives on live and constantly developing events such as agitations. Increased capacity and resources dedicated to investigative journalism and better understanding of public interest issues would take the pressure off the ‘breaking news’ cycle and allow outlets to devote more time to substantial issues. In a perfect world, investigation would trump sensationalism.

But we do not live in a perfect world. And protest coverage in Pakistan is further complicated because the media is not always free to make its own decisions about what to broadcast. Recall January 2013, when the media failed to cover the sit-ins by Hazaras in Quetta and instead obsessed over Tahirul Qadri’s long march from Lahore to Islamabad. Apparently, the powers that be had made a cynical choice regarding which event was meant for the public eye, and which was to be sidelined.

The recent media ban was a clumsy way to achieve the same effect. But censorship is never the correct course — the public has a right to information and it is the media’s job to provide it, no matter how clumsy or counterproductive the coverage may be.

Government officials pointed to the Pemra code of conduct that prohibits live coverage of security operations to explain the ban (a separate debate is needed on the balancing act between limiting exposure of security personnel and allowing them to act with impunity in the absence of media scrutiny). But the code and protest-specific Pemra guidelines do not call for censorship. Indeed, the regulations — including requirements for time delays, prohibiting interviews with members of banned organisations, cautioning against coverage that endangers security personnel, advocating for journalists’ safety, etc — should be sufficient.

Where the recent ban was concerned, it was likely an attempt to prevent others from joining the sit-in or staging dharnas elsewhere in reaction to the security operation. Such an approach is ham-fisted because if a protest has genuine momentum then word will spread no matter what the state does (images of the Hazara protests circulating on social media led to solidarity sit-ins nationwide).

Ultimately, until the media is truly free, and its journalistic capacity is bolstered, we will not know which protests have traction, and which are media-manufactured at the behest of vested interests.

The writer is a freelance journalist.
huma.yusuf@gmail.com
Twitter: @humayusuf

Published in Dawn, December 4th, 2017