Indo-Pak Monitoring—A Panos-supported project on The Hoot
Sevanti Ninan
Theoretically privately-owned Pakistani TV channels cannot be seen in India. But when the news is dramatic enough the footage finds its way to Indian audiences through intermediaries. The first of these is YouTube, which is increasingly transcending political borders to make striking news footage available to the world. And the second is the arrangement satellite TV channels in South Asian countries have with each other. It ensures that when something earthshaking happens in Pakistan, footage from there surfaces across a number of satellite tv channels here.
YouTube as an intermediary which is out of reach of regulators, is increasing in popularity. Some 21 different posts of the attacks on Geo TV are on it, some of them have been viewed by over 3000 people each. One of them posted by an Indian draws the ire of a Pakistani visitor to the site who suggests that the Indian concentrate on the violence in Bengal.
But what had impact across India was the Geo footage that received blanket coverage on the evening of March 16 on all the Hindi and English channels. The most restrained, for some inexplicable reason, was DD news where the coverage that evening was difficult to find: it was a heavy news day, with violence at Nandigram, a Supreme Court justice bursting into tears in court, and so on.
The Geo footage was in both English and Hindustani, graphic in its images of helmeted policemen ripping out blinds, firing tear gas shells, and smashing at computers. Somebody said on camera, "they are trying to break our computers because they are very much angry with our courage". It starred Hamid Mir, the Islamabad bureau chief describing events and sharing his mike every now and then with loud, angry bystanders wanting to express their ire on television and express their solidarity with Geo. Said a woman who described herself as a Supreme Court advocate and a MLA, . "Geo hamare kaan hai, hamare aakh hai." (Geo is our eyes and ears.)
Mir, whose website opens with a quote about him from The Hindu, is one of the best known faces of Pakistani television, the man who has interviewed Osama Bin Laden three times. He was to dominate TV homes in India for several hours that evening offering a belligerent guided tour of the damage done: "You all can see the doors of our office. You stop transmission right away they told us. Cops came through our main entrance. Our colleagues tried to rescue me but cops came in. They were trying to stop them going into newsrooms."
TV anchors in India quickly picked up on the belligerence and reflected it, editorialising and pontificating freely in the process. There was aggression, free editorialising and more than a hint of patronising in the way the story was presented. O you poor things, living under a dictatorship! None of this could have happened here!
Here for instance, is Star News editorialising on Aaj Ki Baat :"We can see what happens to those who cross Musharraf." Then he says, "The media is the fourth pillar of a democracy---what has been done with this fourth pillar the whole world can see." More pontificating: "The press should be allowed to show things as they are in the country." On Aaj tak too the anchor is adding his gratuitous comments: This will prove to be expensive for Musharraf , he says, "unke liye, ghata ka sauda." Later he says that what has happened is a clear message to other media houses.
Times Now too is editorialising freely:"A desperate Pakistan president put on his dictator¿s hat today."
CNN-IBN is running a poll: " Is this the beginning of the end for Musharraf? " Ninety two per cent say yes, says Rajdeep Sardesai. "The situation ballooning out of control." Presumably he means spiralling. Then he asks, "Are we seeing an endgame being played ot in what is an election year in Pakistan?". He brings on Ayaz Amir of Dawn to comment and asks him, "Are people losing the plot in Islamabad?" Amir does not miss the opportunity to hit back. "Just one man who is the darling of the Indian establishment" is losing the plot, he says.
True, things had been building up dramatically in Pakistan over the past few days. The turmoil seemed reminiscent of the situation in Nepal last year. But TV anchors would sound more professional if their personal opinions, coloured by their nationality, were kept out of their anchoring.
The Doomsday predictions were undercut by the President¿s fast footwork. Before the evening was over he was on the air with an apology and a conspiracy theory. Whether you bought it or not, he punctured the alacrity of the TV tribe across the border.