Of blood is a better story to sell, or should it?

One of the fundamental problems with Pakistani media is to treat news more as a commodity than as a social good. This crude concept leads journalists to use fancy words, metaphors, proverbs, and emotionally-charged arguments etc which exaggerate or misrepresent the meaning. For example, “When we say ‘the man is a lion’, we use the image of a lion to draw attention to the lion-like aspects of the man. The metaphor frames our understanding of the man in a distinctive ‘yet partial way’. One of its interesting aspects is that it always produces this kind of one-sided insight. Another interesting feature rests in the fact that metaphor always creates distortions. The man is a lion. He is brave, strong, and ferocious. But he is not covered in fur and does not have four legs, sharp teeth, and a tail!” states Morgan in ‘Images of Organization’.

The commodity concept also pushes TV journalists to use high pitched tones – often choosing to report heavily on juicy aspect of stories with shock value rather than reporting on more pressing issues to the general public. One might say that if media is reflecting the society, then these sensational ways of speaking are justified, considering that Pakistanis are nonetheless loud and emotionally charged people, relative to say the British. But then there is something called ‘Adab-e-Mehfil’: simple things like not speaking before one’s turn, not speaking loudly and so forth. Plus, it would not hurt to ask TV guests to present cultured and educated way of argumentation, based on facts and logic, instead of campaigns of slander, filled with cheap tricks and mocking undertones.

A related part of the problem is: ‘If It Bleeds, It Leads’ to borrow the title of Mathew Kerbel’s famous book. This implies that media in Pakistan is obsessed with the short end of the problem, or the symptom as it is quite rightly said. The challenge of social inequities, usually the root cause, rarely gets air time at best a personalized story or a documentary and then, move on to something more exciting such as a blast.

Source: http://www.tbl.com.pk/clashing-views-on-media-ethics-in-pakistan/