JOURNALISM is a pale shadow of itself if it draws no blood. A journalist may well be on the payroll of a secret service. His or her services may well be for hire. But that is not how it is supposed to be. The press is supposed to have an adversarial relationship with the state or rather with the political and military establishment, which controls the state's levers.

To some extent all politics is a matter of lies and chicanery. Also, pomposity, because all wielders of power run the risk of taking themselves too seriously. The first and foremost business of the press is to point out the lies and expose the chicanery. And prick the balloon of pomposity. When the press performs this function it helps to clear the air and put things in context, two of the other things it must always be doing.

The press does not always live up to this ideal. Journalists are a self-regarding lot, apt to think too much of themselves. Having an inordinate weakness for supping with the good and the great they fancy themselves as power brokers. The irony of this is heightened considering the fact that journalists can also be ignoramuses, especially in a country like Pakistan where the press is often the last refuge of the half-educated man who has ambitions above his station in life. But this is the comic reality and not how things should be.

A journalist is no journalist if he lacks passion. Take the greatest of them all, Henry Louis Mencken. He wrote in a memorable style packing wit and vitality in every sentence. With this as his weapon he commented upon the American scene, poking merciless fun at its politics and morality and the pretensions and hypocrisy of the leading political players of his generation. With every thrust he drew blood.

Mencken on his homeland: "...the United States is essentially a commonwealth of third-rate men (where) distinction is easy... because the general level of culture, of information, of taste and judgment, or ordinary competence is so low...Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards." This comes uncomfortably close to describing Pakistan: third-rate men in rampant control of everything. But, seventy and more years on, it is also a welcome corrective to the arrogance and superior airs which the US has started wearing since the collapse of communism.

Mencken on politicians: "...If experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar...The politician, at his ideal best... is a necessary evil; at his worst he is an almost intolerable nuisance." And here is Mencken on his own profession of journalism: " Most of the evils that continue to beset American journalism today, in truth, are not due to the rascality of owners nor even to the bombast of business managers, but simply and solely to the stupidity, cowardice and philistinism of working newspapermen. The majority of them, in almost every American city, are still ignoramuses, and proud of it. All the knowledge that they pack into their brains is, in every reasonable cultural sense, useless; it is the sort of knowledge that belongs, not to a professional man, but to a police captain, a railway mail-clerk, or a board-boy in a brokerage house." This last applies quite well to the broad fields of Pakistani journalism.

Granted that a newspaperman with Mencken's style and erudition (he had read widely) comes marching once a century. Even so, for all votaries of the journalistic craft his is the model to follow: drawing blood and leaving an indelible image behind when putting pen to paper or, in the e-mail age, tapping a computer's keys.

But in a country like Pakistan whose pillars and scaffolding cannot take the strain of too much sarcasm or raillery, it is not easy to follow the Mencken trail. Write too harshly about the ways of the Republic and you stand accused of subverting its foundations. Say what scumbags its rulers are and you will be accused of cynicism. Point to the hopelessness of the national situation and be ready to shoulder the charge of negativism.

All this is made worse by the internet. Not so long ago when you wrote for a newspaper you were primarily addressing a domestic audience. Now with most English language newspapers being carried on the net, what someone writes can be picked up with equal ease in Andhra Pradesh or California. With this technological expansion in the reach of the written word, anything critical that you write of your country, even if justified by the evidence, can be grist to the mills of your country's detractors.

This is especially true in the Indo-Pak context. With India trying to portray the Pakistan army as a 'rogue army', with India trying to prove that Pakistan is a failed state, with the United States pursuing its own agenda and indiscriminately labeling everything within sight as an example of terrorism or fundamentalism, the knight of the printed page faces a dilemma. The requirements of his trade (I will not say the truth for that is a dicey word) will pull him in one direction, regard for country (I will not say patriotism for that can have a funny meaning) in another. What is he or she to do?

Living in a small town, and in the center of it to boot, with my companions mostly ordinary folk as opposed to the high-minded citizens of Islamabad or the other big cities, I have a fair idea of how bad things are as a result of the military takeover. Even in a military-recruiting town like Chakwal, ordinary folk complain in the harshest terms about army rule which they hold responsible for high prices, unemployment, the sluggishness of the bazar, the municipal engineering (mostly maladroit) of which the army monitoring teams seem to be so fond. This is the overwhelming reality on the ground. How to balance it against the need to present a good image of the country?

Soon the military government's first anniversary in power will be on hand. What can it look back to? Little by way of any tangible achievement, a great deal by way of drifting and confusion. What to talk of the economy being turned around, NAB-style accountability has dried up the last wells of investment, domestic or foreign. Untouched by reform, the bureaucracy remains the mess it was. Foreign policy is a series of defensive reflexes activated by external stimuli.

It is a measure of what things have come to that a nondescript figure like the Commonwealth secretary-general, who would not be taken seriously anywhere else, gets royal treatment here with politicians of every hue vying with each other to dance attendance upon him. A German tourist gets raped in the north and the nation, beginning with the English language press, is deluged by a tide of self-recrimination. As if such things do not happen elsewhere. Blacks have been murdered by white thugs in Germany. There is a proper sense of outrage and the law takes its course. But the country is not seized by a frenzy of self-loathing as is to be seen here at the slightest opportunity. Low self-esteem that's what it is.

All these facts are pretty well known. But the question remains: how far should we take self-criticism? We should not be blind to our follies. That's the path to sure ruin. But at a time when the country's stock is low internationally and we are being assailed on every side for sins, real and invented, to what extent should we make a fetish of honesty? This is the predicament facing the Pakistani journalist in the Internet age.