PAKISTAN: Media Shows Best and Worst in Quake Coverage

   By Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI (Asia Media Forum) - The Pakistani media have played an unprecedented role in the days, weeks and months after the massive October earthquake, stirring strong public response at times and adopting a remonstrative one where the government and army faltered.

   Even its hardened critics will not deny that the media lived up to their role.

   "The performance of the Pakistani media in its coverage (of the earthquake) has been admirable, especially that by electronic media which has done an admirable job, reaching remote places," says I A Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

   On Oct. 8, 2005, an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter Scale hit parts of Pakistan-administered Kashmir and the frontier province.

   The electronic media went into motion, sparing nothing and no one. On the one hand, it showed raw and unedited footage of people digging rubble with their bare hands, the agony of helpless men sobbing like babies, the voices of children screaming for help from under the debris and then poignant silence, a mother crying uncontrollably and kissing her dead infant son back to life. On the other, it showed reporters trudging to far-flung villages and hamlets on foot, sometimes walking for five to seven hours to record villagers lambasting the military and the administration for not doing anything for them despite tall promises. 

   In many ways, the coverage of the earthquake marked the day when the Pakistani electronic media, specially the fledgling private-television channels, came of age - and showed that it can be a force to reckon with.

   The media took the army to task with scathing remarks accompanied by vivid pictures showing all too clearly the shortcomings of the military/government. "But to be fair, while we all received our share of censure at the GHQ, not once was any of the channels banned from the air," Abbas says. (Read the accompanying article ‘Once Again, the Army Was Angry' to read a journalist's account of crossing swords with the military during the quake.)

   To think that it was the administration of Pervez Musharraf that let this genie out of the bottle in 1999 - when he allowed private television operators to rule the airwaves.

   For the first time, right after the quake, the Pakistani nation preferred watching the round-the-clock coverage by local channels rather than switching over to foreign channels. "They didn't feel the need this time as the private channels gave an unprecedented blanket coverage," says Arshad Zuberi, the director of Aaj TV.

   "Considering that they're still a fledgling industry, the private channels should be given credit for it," says Mazhar Abbas, secretary-general of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalist (PFUJ). The role of the private TV channels, he says, has been professional for the most part, considering that they have just joined the battle of the airwaves. However, he concedes that there have been instances where the channels crossed the line between what should have been reported and personal privacy at a difficult time.

   "Our reporters were all inexperienced and young and had never reported on a disaster of this magnitude. Like the rest of the country, even they were benumbed and so what was covered was not always filtered," Azhar Abbas says. "In a way, I'd say it was an experience that matured them overnight. What they learnt there in those few days they would've taken a lifetime to learn. The innocence of these journalists was at times refreshing and one can see the crude coverage getting more refined."

MEDIA VICTIMS AS WELL

   According to the PFUJ spokesman Mazhar Abbas, "Perhaps the most positive aspect of the whole media coverage, also an example of their utmost professionalism, is (the fact that) some of the journalists who were reporting live from the quake-affected region were doing their jobs despite personal losses." The union provided relief - tents, blankets, medicines, to journalists in the quake-affected region.

   According to an assessment of damage and needs of Pakistani journalists and media organisations in the quake-affected area by the Pakistan Press Foundation, 242 persons working for the media suffered personal or property losses in areas covered in the first phase of the mission. Eleven were killed and seventeen injured. Sixty-nine family members of media personnel were killed and 15 injured. A total of 117 houses of media personnel were destroyed and another 54 suffered damages to their homes.

   Owais Aslam, secretary-general of Pakistan Press Foundation who visited the quake-affected areas, narrated how media people carried on "working in tents while the aftershocks continued." He recounted meeting a number who were "devastated and traumatised", and recalled how "telecommunications links in many quake-affected cities completely disrupted". The foundation provided some press club members with mobile phones with airtime donated by a mobile company to get them started.

   "Being on the spot, the media kept the tragedy in the public eye and hence the outpouring of relief and support," says rights activist Zohra Yusuf. The mobilisation of relief efforts of teams of doctors and young volunteers, so unprecedented, could also be attributed to the way the media highlighted the catastrophe. For once, even politicians set aside their war of words. Yusuf is quite satisfied with the media's role as a watchdog though it remains "a new role for the private channels."

   "The common man has shown what it means to be a fellow citizen under a common bond of sovereignty… and that their claim on their country is solely based on their being its citizens" is how (Retired) Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid sees the response of the people.

   However, he believes that the role of the media is far from over after the big news crews leave. They should "demand daily reports with details from the government of the amounts allocated, and collected or received from other agencies, including foreign donors, and what is daily being spent and on what items and services".

   "There is going to be lot of corruption in the management and distribution of funds for relief (this has been the experience in the countries affected by the tsunami disaster of Dec. 26, 2004) and transparency and accountability during the entire process of relief operations is absolutely essential, which is apparently lacking," Zahid adds.

THE TABLOID TRAP

But the electronic media was far from perfect, and it came under fire for falling into tabloid-style journalism. "The tendency towards sensationalism is quite pronounced," says I A Rehman. "In an attempt to illicit vast sympathy, many scenes that are often against human rights and aesthetic norms have been shown."

   He was probably referring to instances such the airing of footage of a woman dying, which could have been avoided. The unethical footage was widely condemned by all quarters.
 
   I A Rehman holds the media responsible for their unsolicited criticism of the government/army, which he says was "sporadic and uninformed". The media's biggest deficiency was their "inability to function as a channel of guidance to the admittedly inadequate establishment on the essential principles of relief work," he says.

   Another criticism of the media is the free rein some gave to religious scholars to interpret this natural calamity as the "wrath of God" for people's sins. "Sadly missing were programmes of an educative, inspirational and instructive variety that could show the way forward. No one tried to explain in a scientific, historical and sociological perspective the incidence of natural calamities - why they happen, how other societies have coped with them, their impact on people and what can be done to make the people safe in the event of future disasters," wrote Zubaida Mustafa in a column in the English-language ‘Dawn' newspaper.

"Initially, I must confess, we concentrated only on the collapse of the Margalla Towers in Islamabad and were unable to inform the people that a bigger more devastating tragedy had occurred further up in the mountains. While we have reporters working in that area, there was complete breakdown in communications. We were also restricted physically as we were unable to get there immediately due to landslides that had blocked roads. Another weakness was that our journalists lacked scientific information about the earthquake," Zuberi says in retrospect.