What a disaster!

My weekly column for The News on Sunday:

Everyone in Pakistan has by now learnt to respond to humanitarian crises, except for TV journalists and editors.

In the last six years alone, we have faced three major natural disasters that affected millions of people each; and several smaller scale calamities that hit communities: A passenger airliner crash, dozens of terrorist attacks on crowded public places, mass murder of pilgrims and at religious gatherings, a town burned down for having the wrong faith, a metropolis terrorised by armed criminals, widespread epidemics, a bus full of school children falling off a mountain road … more than enough experience of dealing with emergencies, and their fallout.

Majority of us have learnt from our mistakes. The affected people are managing to bury their dead and rebuilding their lives without waiting for government’s help. The government officials have learnt to respond quickly with a help-line number, never mind no one ever attends, or even makes those calls, except for cynics who dial just to confirm there’s no one at the other end. The elected leaders who used to hover above devastated land in their helicopters now wade through flood waters or stumble over debris for the benefit of TV cameras. Fellow citizens gather aid supplies and deliver in truckloads. And NGOs reach the remotest parts, though only to feed and shelter a tiny fraction of the needy, and hold workshops for local journalists emphasising that what’s most needed in an emergency situation, even more than food and shelter, is information. Information saves lives and provides relief.

But those charged with providing information on a mass scale choose to remain uninformed. To be fair, the print medium is doing a good job of keeping the rest of the country informed of what’s going on in the calamity-hit areas. Only, newspapers have hardly a readership to speak of. Reading is not one of our national traits, be it a publication, instruction manual, or a traffic sign. FM radio is not very effective either because of its limited range and budgets. Hence the popularity of television, and the enhanced responsibility that comes with it.

In an ironic but true reflection of their audiences, the TV journalists hate reading and learning as much. For them, a disaster is a routine story like sighting of Ramzan moon or arrest of Indian fishermen for crossing into Pakistani waters. No need to gather information; take an old script, change the date and names and you have a brand new story. If it’s flooding, the standard line is: ‘The place is inundated and the residents are facing severe hardships’. Really? They are not enjoying the free swimming pool facility right at their doorstep? If it’s three dozen Faisalabad families mourning the death of their sons who left for sightseeing and returned in coffins, the script is: ‘These families are devastated, the women are wailing …’ And what would you rather have them do? Sing a sad song?

It’s not just unprofessional, it’s pathetic and painful to watch. The morning after — a good 12-14 hours after the Kallar Kahar accident — there was little or no information about the survivors; nothing on where to look for the injured; no eye-witness account; no interviews with school, police, or local government officials. When bits of information did arrive, they did more harm by, for instance, giving only first names of the confirmed dead. Even a person of below average intelligence would expect more than one ‘Amjad’ or ‘Saleem’ or some such common name in a group of more than a 100. But not our TV editor watching over the ticker.

Every channel had a somber-faced reporter standing in front of a dead body or a tamashbeen crowd, saying utter nonsense about his surroundings that were visible to everyone on their screen anyway. Every cameraman was trying to take a close-up of the dead body or the wailing mother or sister … for God’s sake, can’t people even die with dignity and grieve in private? This is criminal behaviour that can only exist in a society in which any joker with a microphone or camera in hand is allowed into a household in mourning.

The jokers in the fields of Sindh, shoving microphones into miserable people’s faces with the question: ‘what are your problems?’, getting and accepting the only possible answer ‘we got nothing in aid’, and standing in ankle-deep water for their piece-to-camera, were bad enough. Do we have to take the freak show inside private homes?
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The Kallar Kahar accident happened on Monday evening, this piece was filed on Wednesday, and the Thursday Dawn 'broke' the news that the bus never fell in a ravine, it overturned on the road. This bit of information took TWO DAYS to come out, not because the accident took place in a remote area - it happened ON THE MOTORWAY - but because none of the reporters in Faisalabad bothered to visit the site or even ask the right questions of traffic police officials. This must be the most shameful coverage of an emergency in Pakistani media ... as yet.