A Letter from Prometheus
It was July 1990 when I was invited by an official in his office for gupshup (chit chat) over the political scenario of the country in the backdrop of the 2 November 1989 vote of con-confidence that the then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto survived.
After discussing “public pulse” about Benazir Bhutto, he offered me a tea break with baby-size samosas, and then he told me he would show me an important reel (VHS cassette). In this video, a young man was in a shooting range and targeting clay pots with an AK-47. I was told he was the husband of the then prime minister Benazir Bhutto (Asif Ali Zardari who served the country thereafter as President) and this video was some 10 years older and Asif Ali Zardari was getting training from enemies of Pakistan for subverting peace in the country.
When I asked my host why he was showing this 10-year-old video to me, he said that the public must know what kind of people were ruling the country. He indirectly told me that being a journalist it was my national duty to tell people about his background through my writings. When he was talking to me I had already understood that it was a “fake video” but there was no use asking questions about the credibility of this video that could have been recorded in a desert area of Sindh or on his own farmland where this young man could do his shooting practice. How could you ask a question about the credibility of a planted material from the person who is planting it on you? After a brief further gapshup I came out of his office and erased the entire conversation from my perception. Time passed away and he never asked me about any article that I ever wrote.
In 1994, I was invited by a friend who was a police official in Lahore while I was doing crime reporting. He told me that he wanted to arrange my meeting with a lady who had ruthlessly been gang-raped but she did not want to come out in public and media, so our meeting would be exclusive and I should raise her issue in the newspaper without naming the woman, but he told me who was alleged rapist.
He named a young gangster who had been first a police informer and then became a threat to Lahore Police. I knew that police were after him and that the gangster had already informed the media that he would be killed in a fake police encounter. My meeting was arranged with that lady who claimed she was ganged raped by Mr Ch. I asked her some questions and could not find a sequence in her story. She covered her face in the meeting so I did not know her real name nor could recognize her face.
When I came out of the place where my meeting was arranged, I told my police officer friend that he should produce this woman with her face covered for a press conference because I did not find her story true or even having half-truth, and told him I would not do a story. I did not ask him any questions though he wanted to get questions from me and was ready to answer with ready-made answers. He told me that publishing this story would be a service to the society and nation for exposing dreadful animals. I told him it is the duty of the police to take action against such dreadful animals if police are honest to take action against them. The time passed and I erased that meeting from my perception.
Planting fake documents, fabricated so-called facts, and providing bogus evidence to journalists are part of the duty of those who are trained to abuse journalists for their vested interest that they usually call “national interests”, while it is the responsibility of a journalist not to become a victim of such moves. The credibility of news cannot be one source that is already known as dubious.
When I got training in Reporting, I had gone through a process. When an excited young reporter enters a reporting room with an exciting story, it is the foremost duty of the Chief Reporter or any senior reporter to guide him/her. In our time, we had to justify every word of our story through a multisource checking process. Our editors and seniors used to guide us and snub us in the process of reality-check and we were told that never ever trust anybody as a “credible source” unless his/her credibility or the credibility of the news (document/audio/video/ etc) is not confirmed from more sources.
Since 2008, there is a race going on among hybrid journalists as to who gets “today’s credible information” first. Excited with a rating and visualizing their next family trip abroad, some of the hybrid anchors even do not change the order of pointers they get as “credible information”. They are successful, powerful, rich, and resourceful and most of them are considered as “credible journalists” that everybody wishes to have contact with.
Raising a journalist was a process that went through the Reporting Room, News Room, and of a death chamber kind in the Editor’s Room.
People today are crying that democracy is threatened by Fake News, deep Fake, and Cheap Fake. I think fake news has been present from the very day the newspapers started publication in the world. The only difference is that journalists were journalists and today we mostly find “Generalists” who know everything through their “intuition”. The majority of journalists are not working through credible sources, rather their desires, dreams, intuitions and official friends are their “sources”.
An artful and intelligent officer used to plant one story at a time on one journalist but today I believe that one story is planted on several so-called journalists at one time and then we see the same story is run by different television channels through their “expensive anchorpersons”. This is the reason that the officer and hybrid journalists (mostly now anchors) are ruthlessly exposed when five or ten anchors are reading line to line the same “credible information” sitting at different TV screens. There is a saying that “excess of everything is bad”.
Since 2008, there has been a race going on among hybrid journalists as to who gets “today’s credible information” first. Excited with a rating and visualizing their next family trip abroad, some of the hybrid anchors even do not change the order of pointers they get as “credible information”. They are successful, powerful, rich, and resourceful and most of them are considered as “credible journalists” that everybody wishes to have contact with.
Sometimes I wish to throw my 35 years of experience in journalism into a gutter and start “reading questions” instead of “asking questions” but I think I would be a failure in doing so because I am an honoured student of my honest and dedicated teachers in journalism. For me and my teachers, journalism was and is a cause, a pious profession, and a hard career chosen by a brave person. Let me stay brave and challenging instead of becoming second fiddle to someone’s desires.
