Pakistani News Channels
A request to Pakistani News Channels.
Remember the times when we had one PTV and one Khabarnama at 9.00 everynight. All the important news effectively reached every citizen of the country. Now after having the media revolution and growth of channels from 1 to around 50, what have we attained? In economic terms, has this “perfect competition” improved the flow, quality and reach of information.
Talking about news stories other than ‘headline news’, lets switch on our magic boxes with hundreds of options.If one of the channels say, ‘Express News’ has found a tragic death story in the hospital (a case of dotors’ neglect) or brutal abuse of a woman at the hands of her in-laws or maybe molesting of a child whose dead body is found buried in the ground! (Can you think of any thing more horrific????) Now change to the next news channel and you will find the same story presented with more flashing “alerts” just to increase the viewer’s misery. Aren’t we better off without the botheration of changing channels!
The so-called “news alerts” also appear at the same time and are almost similar on all the channels.Only the political experts are different and give each other tough competition, they being original in their own way. Their opinions are mostly widely viewed and their free expression is appreciated but news bulletins need a lot of innovation and improvement.
Pakistanis are deprived of the moments to celebrate and we tend to miss out most of them as our media is busy reporting all the sad and tragic happenings like blasts, rapes, abuse and corruption. Ignoring such stories is not the answer BUT they should retain the balance of good and bad, ugly and beautiful, negative and positive. Good reporting does not mean that one should find all the injustices in the society and show it to the people already deprived of food, power, money and jobs. It only leads of hopelessness and media has the role of building a positive nation with hope and dreams.
I am sure these channels have thousands of reporters all over the country and they can easily find common people around them who are not Abdul Sattar Edhi but still are contributing to the society in a positive way. We would like to see a “good” Pakistani on our channels who is not a killer nor a corrupt politician. Please give us a ray of hope not in the form of drama artists but our street heroes….
