How many of you watched the footage of criminal suspects in Chiniot being tortured by the police? Many, I hope, because if you didn’t, that’s a whole lot of air time going to waste.
I caught the footage on a local news television channel late Monday night. I watched it again on Tuesday morning when I woke up, and then again the same night before I slept. On Wednesday, I didn’t watch television.
In the race to break news and be the first to broadcast a report, news networks are going overboard. This is an understatement when one is talking about a media industry that deems it acceptable to repeatedly show footage of naked men being whipped by police officials, as captured on a cell phone camera. With each broadcast, viewers got a sense of just how proud the news channel was of its great find - so proud that they played the clip over and over again.
I understand that for the government to take notice of grave offenses, they have to be brandished across the media. For playing that role, I salute the media. But once the concerned authorities have taken notice and are moved to action, the public display of madness should stop. Why did we need to see the police brutality clip for hours after Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah ordered an inquiry into the matter and declared the guilty policemen would be suspended?
After the politicians took notice, the media could have continued its critique of police brutality by shaming the policemen – and for that, broadcasting their pictures all over the country would have been enough. Instead of repeating the same footage over and over again, channels could have zoomed in and out of mugshot photographs of the policemen responsible for carrying out the torture. But perhaps that wouldn’t have been sensational enough.
The two police constables who had kidnapped, raped, and killed a three-year-old girl last year in Karachi had their pictures pasted all over the newspapers while television channels showed them handcuffed in police custody. That is how something brutal should be covered. Rather than flaunt pictures of the little girl's body, the media just had to put the faces of the policemen on our screens and papers - it was enough to appall us.
The media has a responsibility to broadcast the truth and break the news on time. However, the media forgets that it also has a responsibility to respect victims and their need for privacy.
Starting off with the biggest example of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake to Peshawar’s recent Meena Bazaar blast, the fascination with live coverage has caused us to look at limbs and dead bodies without flinching. This is not your latest Quentin Tarantino movie. These are actual people who have families watching television. No one deserves to find out about the death of their child or parent through live coverage of a blast. No one needs to look at blown away limbs to understand a disaster has taken place. And most of all, no one needs to look at the way barbaric officials create their own parallel justice system.
Shyema Sajjad is a Desk Editor at Dawn.com
