Missing children’s issue: Who’s responsible for spreading rumours?

Media criticised for its failure to verify reports on the matter

LAHORE: Parents of some school-going children have expressed concerns about the wellbeing of their children in view of rumours about rising incidents of child kidnappings.

Many parents told The Express Tribune that since the resumption of classes after the summer vacations they had started picking and dropping their children on their own instead of relying on those providing school pick and drop service. They said they had approached schools’ administrations to improve security measures.

A security in charge at a private school in the city said that children were allowed to leave the school only with their parents. He said parents were required to identify themselves by looking into a camera installed at the main entrance.

Columnist Wusatullah Khan says that the government has been unable to dispel rumours about rising incidents of kidnapping of children. He says Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif should have addressed the public on the issue instead of leaving the task of presenting facts and figures about missing children to police high ups and his ministers.

Khan also blames the mainstream media outlets for spreading fear among the public by airing unverified reports. He has urged the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) to play its role in the matter. “The PEMRA should issue warnings to television channels on broadcasting rumours and unverified reports on the issue,” he said.

He says the media should also have told the public that taking the law into their own hands would not solve any problem. He says it is unfortunate that the media is interested only in ratings.

Punjab University Dean Zakariya Zakir has a different opinion on the matter. He says the standard of reporting in the mainstream media on the issue had been quite professional. “Overall, the media has shown a high level of maturity in the last few years,” he says. He says there have been instances when the standard of reporting in Pakistani media was higher than that in the US.

Zakir says the responsibility for spreading rumours about child kidnappings lay with the social media. “Sharing of unverified videos and photographs on social media sites spread fear among the public,” he says. He says the social media is now in control of the public opinion. “Our masses are very emotional. They don’t have a scientific orientation so they easily fall for rumours and conspiracy theories,” he said.

Operations AIG Shahzada Sultan, Police Department’s spokesperson on missing children issue, also holds the social media responsible for spreading rumours about the issue. He says no such situation would have arisen if reports were verified before sharing it with the public. He says he has seen various false reports shared on social media websites. “Following one such report a police team wasted several hours looking for two corpses in EME Society,” he says. The report had claimed that mutilated bodies of two children were found dumped in a vacant plot. In Multan, a citizen forwarded to everyone in his list of contacts an SMS saying that 8,000 kidnappers had entered the province. He never sought to verify the claim by contacting the police, Sultan says. “When contacted, he said, he had received the message from an unknown cell phone number.”

Published in The Express Tribune, August 30^th, 2016.