‘Regulating the Taste of People’

BY subarno c| IN Media Monitoring | 11/01/2006

Subarno Chattarji

Overview:

The recent ban on foreign, particularly Indian, television channels by the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) invited some passionate media commentary and outrage. The ban is only the latest in a series going back to the Kargil War. The six pieces under consideration are from both sides of the border and they lay out two basic arguments. One, that viewers in Pakistan have a right to television of their choice and PEMRA violated a fundamental tenet of free communication. Two, that PEMRA¿s ban was motivated by the need to maintain Pakistan¿s ¿purity¿ and had no political or economic reasons. 

Regulating Taste: 

The argument for free consumer choice was articulated in a Dawn editorial, ¿PEMRA¿s absurd ban¿ (December 24, 2005): ¿[…] PEMRA¿s action seems to suggest that a concept as basic as consumer choice or letting the viewers decide what they want to watch is something alien to it. […]The ban needs to be revoked and viewers given the choice to decide what channel they want to watch.¿ Dawn placed the ban on Indian channels within contexts of recent moves between the two countries to increase people-to-people contacts, thereby indicating the disjunction between different policy initiatives of the Pakistani government. It also referred to the economics of advertising that may have influenced the ban and called for more robust and creative Pakistani programming rather than a ban to cope with the challenge represented by channels from across the border. 

In contrast to the bland reasonableness of Dawn, Dr Khalil Ahmad (Alternate Solutions Institute, Lahore, Pakistan) offers a more scathing indictment of the parochialism that underlay PEMRA¿s decision (¿PEMRA: Regulating the Taste of People,¿ http://asinstitute.org/page.php?instructions=page&page_id=397&nav_id=75) , relating the shortage of TVs and antennas in Lahore when the first Indian movie was telecast from an Indian channel in the 80s. He cites PEMRA¿s constitution to indicate how the ban violates its mandate, one of which is to ¿Ensure accountability, transparency and good governance by optimizing the free flow of information.¿ PEMRA is also mandated to ¿Enlarge the choice available to the people of Pakistan in the media […] [on] subjects of public and national interest.¿ As Ahmad notes there is an obvious irony in the gap between the mandate and subsequent actions, because ¿public and national interest¿ has always been defined in terms of the interests of the ruling powers. 

Dr Ahmad concludes: ¿As no regulatory body has the right to regulate the life of people but they themselves, controlling the taste of people for this or that reason is quite fascistic an act and clearly beyond the mandate of PEMRA.¿ Ahmad¿s critique is well-intentioned and entirely correct about the blatant ways in which state bodies censor information and entertainment, attempting to create in this case, a sense of cultural homogeneity. Amir Mir quotes Iftikhar Rashid, PEMRA¿s chairman, who declared that ¿the ban will continue on all foreign channels that negate the social, cultural and religious values of Pakistan¿ (¿A Nation Deprived of Indian Channels, DNA Mumbai, December 29, 2005). What exactly these quintessentially Pakistani values are and how they are negated by foreign TV programmes is of course not spelt out. 

Hasan Mansoor offered a similar analysis to the one given by Dr Ahmad and Amir Mir, and lamented the fact that ¿The female population of Pakistan [which] seldom misses any episode of the unending soaps [on STAR PLUS]¿ would now be bereft (¿Pak puts fresh curbs on Indian channels,¿ Mid Day, December 25, 2005). He also pointed out that of the 64 foreign channels declared legitimate by PEMRA ¿forty are in English, five in Arabic, two in German, one in Persian and one each in Bangladeshi and Turkish,¿ implying that it is the Hindi soaps that the Pakistani audience will miss the most. One has to take Mansoor¿s (and indeed all other analysts¿) word on trust because no figures regarding viewership or viewer patterns are offered in any of the articles. In passing one wonders whether ¿Bangladeshi¿ constitutes a separate language. 

Motives for ban: 

Various motives are attributed for the PEMRA ban. Mir quotes Rashid¿s point about cultural purity and also Khalid Sheikh, Chairman, Cable Operators Association of Pakistan: ¿"Their [Pakistan TV channel owners] gripe is that the Indian channels, especially Star Plus and Ten Sports eat into advertising pie that they are dependent on."¿ Therefore one motive for the ban, as Mansoor also points out, could be pressure from owners of Pakistani satellite channels who find that their viewers prefer soaps from across the border rather than homebred ones. In this analysis the economic interests of a powerful lobby coincide with those of the political dispensation. 

The economics of licensing were unconsciously underlined by PEMRA¿s chairman who stated: ¿"Only those channels have been banned which did not even reply to our letters [regarding broadcasting without licenses and non-application for licenses]"¿ (¿Foreign channels not banned to benefit local ones,¿ The News International/Jang). He then said that Rs. 1.27 crores had been paid by 9 STAR channels for a five-year license. That PEMRA not only regulates for reasons of public morality and national purity is proven by this symbiosis of politics and economics. 

Limitations of analysis: 

Dr Ahmad, among others, mentioned that the immediate provocation for the ban was that local Pakistani channels were broadcasting cricket matches through South African channels instead of Ten Sports, the channel that had bought the rights to the telecasts. Neither Ahmad nor any other analyst mentioned parallels between this instance of telecast piracy and an earlier one across the border. Prasar Bharati, which lost its bid to telecast India¿s historic tour of Pakistan in 2004 to Ten Sports, then muscled in on broadcast rights, effectively leveraging government influence and patriotism. The point is that the state on both sides of the border has intervened to serve its own channels rather than allow for competition partly because the money in cricket broadcasts is astronomical. 

None of the writers mention media biases that are inherent in all media coverage and dissemination, thereby providing in-built modes and codes of self-censorship.[i] Dr Ahmad implies that exclusive reliance on the free play of the market will offset state intervention, as if inDIVidual choices are not mediated by that very market. While market forces may be preferable to state interference the former are not as benign or neutral as Ahmad seems to believe. 

On both sides of the border the coverage of the PEMRA ban omitted references to a similar ban instituted by the Indian Information and Broadcasting ministry during the Kargil War, which included PTV as well as web pages of Pakistani newspapers. The PTI headline of December 28, 2005, ¿No Indian channels available: Pakistan is angry,¿ betrays a certain smugness and historical amnesia, as if India had never/would never institute such a ban. The claims for cultural and moral policing made by PEMRA¿s chairman were aired in India when Sushma Swaraj, for instance, campaigned against Fashion TV as being inimical to Indian culture. The guardians of our cultures are alive and well in their respective domains. 

No comments or analysis, even in passing, were offered on the content of the STAR PLUS soaps so avidly consumed by the women of Pakistan. One can only wonder what cultural, gender, class, and ideological biases embedded in the Saas-Bahu soaps appeal to the Pakistani audience, and how they help to reconstitute inequities in an unequal society. 

Finally, all pieces refer to STAR PLUS and Ten Sports as ¿Indian channels¿ which they are not either in their ownership or location. A major part of the programming for STAR PLUS emanates from the Ekta Kapoor tearjerker factory, but Rupert Murdoch still calls the shots in terms of primary equity stakes. Similarly Ten Sports is neither owned by an Indian nor located in the country. This point highlights the transnational nature of media corporations and the complex interplay between global capital investment on the one hand and local capital, cultural, and political investments on the other. The free flow of information remains as much of a chimera in the global village as it did in a pre-24/7 media era. 

[1] See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (London: Vintage, 1994) for a classic analysis of media filters and factors such as proprietorship that determine news coverage.