The Sorry State of Pakistan’s News Channels

Media being the fourth pillar of the state is considered vital for maintaining social, economic, and political stability of the country. It has a powerful effect on the people. Sociology sees media through one of its major perspective, structural functionalism, and classifies media’s functions into two categories. Its manifest function is to inform, educate and entertain society. Its latent functions include grooming of personal communication skills, individuality growth etc. The dysfunction of media is a rejection of performing its manifest functions. Any negative influence on public is its dysfunction. Psychological traumas caused by media could therefore, be labeled as dysfunction of media.

Media is playing great role in every society. It plays important role in setting agendas of public. We all are bombarded with information all day. Electronic, print and social media are the current three common types of media. Media has not been free since the independence of Pakistan, however, in 2000 Pervaiz Musharraf give full freedom to media. He privatized it and gave licenses to many news channels. Before that PTV, a government owned channel, was the news channel for the audience and they were used to its pattern, way of communication. However, sadly, PTV has been used as a tool by successive governments to advance their own agenda. Hence, PTV has been known to project a biased view of events.

However then one wonders why these private channels were given licences? To do just marketing, or get into the ratings war, to bring depression to people, and to continue with the biased trend like PTV for their beloved political parties? Or whether the actual reason of their freedom was to “to educate, inform, entertain people”? Today’s news channels are actually same like a pressure cooker which make spice, hard news which are garnished with biased/ taunting comments. They believe “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms”

It is the responsibility of news channels to highlight those issues which are good for the public and discourage unethical factors of the society. But the reality of our society that we only highlight those issues in which we have our own interest or they are easy to asses.

News provided through media has a strong influence on us. The ordinary public is a puppet of worthless news and media. It can change opinions because it has direct access to the people. Our media tells the world what exactly we are, what are our norms, values and culture. Being an Islamic country, our media should represent us in a good way towards the world. There are just so much talk shows and political debates on the screen all the time and sometimes they seems to be crossing their limits.

Media is responsible for the society’s trends, norms, values and so on. People are what they see, around them. Media reflects the society and it is the responsibility of media to expose the country to the whole world. So it is the responsibility of our news channels to stop promoting the wrong acts of other countries. What was the need to advertise the movie “bajrangi bhaijaan” without knowing the whole aspect of it?

Also, our news channels seem to be in a race of who is going to air the news first whether it is true or not. Which is quite bad. Our news channels have to settle a panel and ask question from Indian media about what message they are giving through this movie that Muslim disable girl is a thief and an Indian man help him.

Media must perform its role in the development of our nation. Although everybody has a right to speak but with the power of freedom comes a responsibility. Media must use this power more wisely. No doubt media is doing fine work with positive approach towards people and society. Its the requirement of time that our media should work for the positive and real soft image of Pakistan. To bring change in the media world be the one who is crazy enough to think that they can change the world, and be the one who does.