media watch: Free Vs responsible

[fatman17]

media watch: Free Vs responsible

Safiya Aftab

In a country which has suffered successive dictatorships characterised by ridiculous controls on expression, no one can really contend against the argument for a free media. Neither can anyone condone excessive regulation or control of media. But this is precisely where we skate on thin ice

Things can be both good and bad. The media in Pakistan is an example. Consider.

The proliferation of television news channels in Pakistan over the last six years has been held up as one of the few positive trends in the country, and a veritable feather in the cap of former President Musharraf. It’s hard to fault this view.

In a country which has suffered successive dictatorships characterised by ridiculous controls on expression, no one can really contend against the argument for a free media. Neither can anyone condone excessive regulation or control of media. But this is precisely where we skate on thin ice. Free media is not synonymous with responsible media.

Just consider what passes for news analysis on most, if not all, local television channels. Much of it, at best, is superficial; at worst, positively misleading and dangerous. From hate-speech against other religions and minority sects to the exposition of long-disproved conspiracy theories, Pakistani news channels have it all.

While it would perhaps be asking too much of the media, the men and women who project views and help project them, to be devoid of the social prejudices and intolerance that permeates our society, we can at least expect and demand substantive analysis on technical issues, notably the economy. Here’s how it goes.

One can have a variety of opinions on how to solve economic problems, but at the very least the anchors interviewing economic analysts should have some basic understanding of the issue at hand. For their part, the analysts should be specific in their answers.

Not so. Here’s a frustrating example of obtuse analysis on a channel that claims to be the country’s most watched channel.

The Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan called an emergency press conference fairly late at night on October 17 to discuss the Bank’s strategy for dealing with the liquidity crunch in Pakistan’s banking sector. She announced a 200 basis point reduction in the cash reserve requirement, suspension of the statutory liquidity requirement on time deposits and advised the banks to bring advance-deposit ratios to about 70 percent. This was in addition to the announcement of measures that the SBP has taken to more effectively regulate commercial banks in the wake of rumours of certain private banks declaring bankruptcy.

The Governor’s statement also included a brief reference to the reasons why Pakistani banks are, in the SBP’s opinion, relatively better placed to withstand shocks compared to banks in the west for whom consumer and housing finance constitutes a significant share in the total lending portfolio.

You don’t need a PhD in economics to identify the basic issues here:

* Although the Governor stressed that the press conference was only concerned with the discussion of liquidity issues, the measures she announced were essentially indicative of a loosening of monetary policy (in developing countries, reserve requirements and not open market operations are the essential tools available to central banks to control the money supply). What does this mean for inflation?

* To what extent is the liquidity crunch the result of excessive government borrowing, and should the SBP have taken steps to curtail that rather than injecting liquidity in the market?

The press conference had barely finished when the cameras switched to the newsroom with two anchorpersons interviewing an expert.

One of them clarified that he wanted the expert to explain the implications of the Governor’s policy announcement. Fair enough. But then, just before handing over the floor to the expert, he proceeded to make an impassioned speech about how the developed economies had in effect nationalised their banks in the last week while we were “still depending on the market” to sort out banking-sector issues. Conclusion: did this not imply that we were enslaved by capitalism etcetera.

There goes the long explanation by the Governor in her press conference on the differences in the banking crises in the west and in Pakistan.

One would have liked to ask the impassioned anchor how many of his friends and relatives had taken out mortgages to buy houses with little or no collateral requirements and then seen property prices tumble — the phenomenon which is essentially at the root of the banking crisis in the US and UK and which has no parallel in Pakistan.

Having established his “credentials” as a radical and an iconoclast, the anchor then turned to the expert for an explanation of what had happened in the press conference. It was then that the fun began. The expert, who had obviously been lined up in a hurry and at an awkward time, proceeded to enlighten the audience with the following facts:

* Pakistan’s economy is in a bad shape;

* The value of the rupee is sliding every day;

* If there is a recession in the west, this will affect FDI flows as well as export growth in Pakistan;

* The SBP was attempting to make credit available to the private sector; and

* The developed world had effected an about-turn on capitalism by nationalising banks.

The only fact missing from this analysis was that the sun rises from the east. This last would have had as much to do with the implications of the policy measures announced as anything else.

If the channel was taken by surprise by the Governor’s late announcement, they should really have done better to simply broadcast the conference, and leave the comment to another day rather than subjecting viewers to such ill-informed commentary. And with all those advertising revenues at hand, is it too much to ask to hire informed journalists as anchors? Surely, the days of immaculately groomed presenters reading from the teleprompters, with no idea of what they are talking about, are over?

Some serious self-analysis is in order to make free expression compatible with responsible expression.

The writer is a Research Fellow at Strategic and Economic Policy Research (SEPR), Islamabad