SMOKERS’ CORNER: THE FINE PRINT

Published March 25, 2018
Illustration by Abro
Illustration by Abro

Pakistani TV news channels seem to change their support for certain political parties and state institutions faster than a person would change their undergarments. Newspapers, on the other hand, do so in a more controlled manner. In the United Kingdom, one of the country’s largest daily, The Guardian, has for decades been a clear supporter of Britain’s left-leaning Labour Party. However, during England’s 2010 election, The Guardian switched its support to the centrist Liberal Party. The paper went back to supporting the Labour Party after the Liberal Party was routed in the election.

Newspapers in the UK (and their websites) are remarkably open about which political party they endorse. For example, two other major newspapers in Britain, The Daily Telegraph and Financial Times, are overtly pro-Conservative Party. Things in this respect are not as unambiguous in the United States, though. Many US newspapers do openly endorse their favourite presidential candidates during an election but they do not overtly support political parties the way British newspapers do.

According to a detailed study by Pamela Engel published in the Business Insider (October 21, 2014), US dailies, such as The Wall Street Journal, have a large conservative readership and thus have been aligned with the centre-right Republican Party. On the other hand, another prominent US daily, The New York Times, has almost always endorsed the centrist Democratic Party.

Do media houses keep in mind the political views of their consumers?

TV news channels in the US, on the other hand, have been a lot more open about which US parties they are aligned with. According to Engel’s study, CNN is more left-leaning (in the context of mainstream American politics) and Fox News is clearly on the right. This may also be understood as CNN being pro-Democratic-Party and FOX being pro-Republican.

A newspaper’s, TV channel’s or news website’s political orientation is largely based on the ideological disposition of the majority of its consumers. In her report, Engel demonstrated this by using a widespread survey conducted in 2014 by the Pew Research Centre which tried to determine which print or electronic news outlets — conservative, liberal or ‘neutral’ — Americans were getting their news from.

Choosing a political stance by news outlets is largely about catering to the needs of the outlet’s majority consumers. Thus, this also becomes a business decision as much as an ideological one.

But having said that, in an October 7, 2016 article, the managing editor of one of Denver’s largest dailies, The Denver Post, Linda Shapely writes that the editorial/opinions section is not just another section or department in a newspaper: it is a separate entity. The editorial is the opinion of this entity, a position that it takes on an issue. Shapely wrote that newspapers have always taken sides but more in an attempt to help leaders and readers find solutions to complicated issues.

While Pakistani TV channels have been rather blatant about the sides they choose, these, too, are determined by the political leanings of the majority of their viewers. Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) supporters are more likely to watch GeoNews, whereas pro-Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf and pro-Pakistan Peoples Party viewers are likely to watch ARY News. However, according to Engel, a TV channel, which, for example, is aligned with a liberal or conservative point of view, will try to also create spaces for opposing viewpoints so as not to completely repulse viewers from the other side of the divide.

Political/ideological alignments of Pakistani newspapers, however, have been less obvious and more evolutionary. For example, the journey of Dawn in this context has been rather fascinating ever since its inception in 1941. This journey has been brilliantly captured in In Search of Sense, the biography of Dawn’s former editor, Ahmad Ali Khan (which was completed by his daughter Dr Naveed Ahmad Tahir after his death in 2015) and in From Religion to Fascism: Memoirs of a Journalist by Dawn’s Readers’ Editor, Muhammad Ali Siddiqi.

Dawn was founded by Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1941 as a mouthpiece of his centrist All-India Muslim League (AIML) in pre-Partition India. After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Dawn also started to come out from Karachi. Once its Delhi office and press were attacked and burnt down by a mob of Hindu extremists, Dawn became a Pakistani newspaper. From 1947 till the late 1960s, this newspaper continued to be associated with various versions of the Muslim League. In the 1960s, it largely supported the modernist Ayub Khan dictatorship. Dawn’s editorials of the era suggest that it found Ayub’s idea of Pakistan close to that of Jinnah’s modernist Muslim state.

In 1967 when Z.A. Bhutto formed his populist left-leaning PPP to oppose the Ayub regime, a report in Dawn about the party’s first convention lambasted it for being a party of “ideological oddballs.” In December 1971, when Bhutto came to power, the paper quickly fell on the wrong side of his so-called ‘socialist’ plans, criticising his policies of nationalisation and his “authoritarian demeanour”. Never to forget a slight, Bhutto almost shut down the paper.

Today, Dawn is considered to be perhaps the most liberal, progressive and pro-democracy English daily in Pakistan. Yet, the immediate post-Bhutto period (1977-1979) is the paper’s most intriguing. In his essay for the September 1984 issue of Asian Survey, veteran historian Lawrence Ziring quotes a 1978 Dawn editorial which lamented that Gen Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship — which had replaced the Bhutto regime in July 1977 and was aiming to implement ‘Islamic laws’ — had not honoured its commitment.

Then in February 1979, when the dictatorship announced a series of such laws, the February 12 editorial in Dawn lavished heaps of praise on Zia for taking “a major step towards the Islamisation of Pakistan.” Indeed, these were the same laws that have continued to create some serious constitutional, political and social complications. Nevertheless, Dawn soon fell out with Zia when the daily began publishing regular reports on a volatile anti-Zia movement in Sindh in 1981. From that day on, Dawn’s position as a progressive media outlet has remained constant.

No Pakistani newspaper has openly endorsed a political party during an election. However, The News these days is considered by many as a pro-PML-N (and anti-PTI) broadsheet. The irony is that The News was instrumental in galvanising support for PTI chairman Imran Khan during the 2007 Lawyers’ Movement and then again during the 2013 election.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 25th, 2018

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