[Reader-list] Journalism or Artistry-Hajra Mumtaz in Dawn

[rashneek kher]

As relevant to India as to Pakistan
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http://www.dawn.com/2011/02/07/journalism-or-artistry.html

*REMEMBER the Khabarnama at nine that used to be the main source of
electronic news in Pakistan? It’s hard to believe now that it was barely a
little over a decade ago.
*
In an astonishingly short period of time, journalism in Pakistan has gone
from being the world of the lean and the deadpan to that of the glitterati.

The hacks of the old days got along with salaries that were less than the
lunch expense accounts of today’s journalism stars. They worked hours that
prevented them from socialising with anyone other than their colleagues,
chased stories that they meticulously but baldly reported in full detail:
name, age, resident of, and so on.

How different that is from the current climate, when practically every
bright young thing wants a career in the media. And yet, go to any gathering
of an older generation of journalists and you hear many a hack — a term they
use with pride to describe themselves — sigh that ‘journalism is no longer
what it used to be’.

The young ‘uns often find themselves struggling to understand this
nostalgia: why, given that today’s media landscape in Pakistan is more
outspoken and more exciting than ever before?

Sure, tendencies have been evident towards sensationalism and
rumour-mongering, but on the other hand, very little is beyond the scope of
today’s journalists, unafraid as they are of any topic. Newspaper language
is today far more lively and evocative than the deadpan reports of
yesteryear, and television — well, we all know how exciting televised news
in Pakistan is.

I found the answer in a book called Secrets of the Press, in a 1999 essay
‘Dumbing up’ by British writer and broadcaster Peregrine Worsthorne, who
retired from journalism as the editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

He starts the essay talking about when he joined the profession, shortly
after the Second World War. For the entire two years of that first job, he
wasn’t allowed to write a single line, and was instead expected to content
himself with subbing the writing of others, correcting grammar,
fact-checking, etc.

For an aspiring writer such as himself, this was frustrating in the extreme.
He likens it to expecting a future virtuoso pianist to concern himself with
misprints in the concert’s programme.

This essay was written at the end of his career, however, and after decades
of experience here is how he put the difference between then and now: “The
most important qualification for being a journalist when I began 50 years
ago was not an ability to write. That was even a disadvantage or a
liability, since literary facility could so easily tempt a journalist into
embroidering the tale which needed, above all else, to be told plainly and
unvarnished.”

Worsthorne writes that in that age, raking up muck was considered unworthy
of a quality press, for “an adversarial stance, while being the easiest to
take, might not always be the right one”.

By the end of the century, the UK press was very different and as Worsthorne
concedes, newspapers across the board have become more well-written,
sophisticated and lively, as well as more adversarial.

“Journalism, instead of being the Cinderella of the professions, has become
the most sought-after of all, attracting a quite disproportionate number of
the brightest in the land,” he points out. This is quite similar to what has
happened to journalism in Pakistan.

And as Worsthorne says, the influx of the best and the brightest ought,
theoretically, to have led to the raising of standards. But in the UK, in
Worsthorne’s view, merely the quality of writing has improved.

No advances have been seen, according to him, in the reliability of the
news, accuracy in reporting and balance in comment.

This is because “the journalist as aspiring writer or intellectual, rather
than as hack, has little concern with ‘mean’ facts, as the poet Coleridge
called them, if they get in the way of a more ‘comprehensive’ truth that he
is trying to make, either in his stories, if he is a reporter, or in his
ideas and arguments, if he is a columnist. For the journalist as writer or
intellectual fancies himself an artist, and an artist is by definition
someone who has a skill which enables him to improve on nature, as much in
words as in paint, clay or music.

There is an element of trickery in art — sublime trickery, at best, but
trickery nevertheless.”

Worsthorne’s point is that “Increasingly in the media today, truth is being
sacrificed to art (or at least artfulness); reporting to literature. […]
Newspapers are far more sophisticated, far cleverer, far better written than
they ever were before; incomparably more entertaining and readable.

[…] But therein lies the danger: the picture of the world presented by the
media is both much more beautiful and much more ugly, both much more
eye-catching and much more dramatic, both much more simple and much more
complicated, than in actuality it ever is. […] When the ancient Chinese
wished to lay a curse on an enemy, they said ‘May you live in interesting
times.’

“Given today’s media, nobody can any longer escape falling victim to that
malediction. Just as the painter excludes from his painting any colour
extraneous to his personal vision, so does the contemporary
journalist-writer-intellectual filter anything uninteresting from his story,
leader, column or feature article.”

His comments are extremely relevant to journalists in Pakistan, whether in
print or on television. Journalism, when held hostage to artistry and
artifice, is in danger of becoming fiction — or, at least, fictionalised. On
television in particular, there is often evidence of journalism that is the
product of the purported journalist’s dedication to some higher purpose or
truth, be it ideological or otherwise.

In such a situation — as we have unfortunately seen over the blasphemy laws’
issue in particular — the plain facts can be drowned out in all the
shouting, or be forgotten by the way.

Former Guardian editor C.P. Scott observed that “comment is free, but facts
are sacred”. Pakistani journalists must ask themselves: are they
disseminating the whole truth or nothing but the truth, or merely presenting
their own version of the truth?

The writer is a member of staff.
*
hajrahmumtaz at gmail.com*
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-- 
Rashneek Kher
http://www.kashmiris-in-exile.blogspot.com
http://www.nietzschereborn.blogspot.com