During the global epidemic of Coronavirus, the media houses around the globe is helping their country’s leaders, spreading awareness and knowledge to the people and showing positive steps of respected government in order to provide a sight of relief for the desperate and stressed people.
But media in Pakistan is busy spreading fake news, rumours, negativity, and playing the dirty game of politics for opposition parties.
Gulf news exposed the dirty face of Pakistani media in a recent article published on March 27, 2020.”
“In the time of coronavirus, Pakistan’s media is playing politics-politics. Media agenda: how to politicise coronavirus while saying how not to politicise coronavirus, Gulf News stated in a headline.”
In a special article to Gulf News, A senior journalist explained how Pakistani media is playing a game of “Politics Politics”.
Mehr Tarar in a Special article to Gulf News wrote: “If I were to transcribe the questions and answers of “senior” electronic media journalists and Prime Minister Imran Khan, I’d need to write multiple articles, all exceeding any readable word limit, and yet miserably failing to make a sense of whatever the hell happened in that media meet, pardon my French. This article is going to be long too, I fear.
As the world buckles under the merciless COVID-19, the most developed countries are doing their fatigued best to operate within the limits of their overwhelmed healthcare systems. Italy is removing its dead in army vehicles.
Iran, a country burdened under international sanctions, seems beaten, trying to make its emaciated medical facilities work. The USA, with its inexplicably late response to the enormity of COVID-19, is closing one city after the other, agonised where to treat its daily-increasing cases of COVID-19.
The media in most countries has a single-point agenda: COVID-19. In Pakistan, media also has a single-point agenda: how to politicise coronavirus while saying how not to politicise coronavirus.”
She added in her article to Gulf News: “Past midnight, later that night, after watching in entirety, on YouTube, the March 24 media briefing, it dawned on me: I had brand-new respect for Prime Minister Imran Khan.
His patience, his unflustered appearance, his countless “baat toh sun lain” (please hear me out), Prime Minister Khan, today, is a motivational force for all those high on self-imagined power and Twitter following who need to calm the hell down, and ask themselves a question or dozen.
I listened to each and every word. Despite being used to for years to Pakistan media’s theatrics and penchant for sensationalism, the Punjabi chatterbox me was dumbfounded.
Hurling expletives at my laptop screen at 2am would have been the reflex, but I’m wary of redundant actions. It was the questions that had me baffled.
It was not that the questions were hard hitting. If that was the intention, they missed the mark by a mile or two. Most of the questions, some of the most well-known talk show hosts asked, were sarcastic, patronising, and meant to mock or demean. They didn’t even bother to word them in a manner that would at least pretend to be the right protocol for an interaction with the prime minister of the country.
If it wasn’t for the timing, it’d have been just another media interaction between the prime minister and talk show hosts, smug in their power of reaching millions of screens across Pakistan, and wherever Pakistani TV channels are viewed.
When the world is united in its agony of once-in-a-century pandemic, where almost all the countries of all the continents except Antarctica are watching in terror-stricken sadness their young and old, their rich and poor, their healthy and frail testing positive for coronavirus, and when the international media has synchronised all its coverage and reportage to COVID-19, the March 24 Pakistan media event had questions and remarks that had not much to do with coronavirus.
Some were genuine questions about the governmental steps regarding coronavirus. Some were insults thinly disguised as important queries about COVID-19. The ones that made Twitter headlines were all direct attacks on the prime minister of Pakistan. It was the timing that made the questions–otherwise expected from most Pakistani anchors–that became a huge question mark on the integrity of their profession. Source: Gulf News.