Talking heads, muted minds

You can turn down the sound of your TV, but you cannot dial down its noise. Welcome to the mad, mad world of tele-troopers.

It is a world full of fury signifying — well — perhaps a bit. But this bit is enough to echo through hollow chambers that house our national discourse. Here’s the thing though: if the tele-troopers shape this discourse, what shapes them?

There are 48 news channels in Pakistan, give or take a few. Each of these channels has at least three talk shows per night (7pm, 8pm, 10pm) with normally one anchor and three guests. So that’s three anchors per channel per day which amounts to (48x3=144). Yes ladies and gentlemen, that’s 144 ‘anchors’ every day who adorn the screens of the idiot box in your homes. Shocked? There’s more.

Now comes the weekend. That’s a separate cadre of anchors we are talking about. So add another three anchors per day per channel for the weekend and the number adds to another 144 anchors.

In other words, Pakistan is currently watching the Emmy-winning performances of 288 anchors every week. Let us assume every channel doesn’t have three talk shows every day and there are some duplications and yet this figure of 288 cannot go below 250 at the very least.

Can you name 250 TV anchors?

Oh wait. There are the guests too. Go ahead, reach for that calculator: Average guests per show (3) multiplied by shows per day (3) multiplied by numbers of news channels (48) is….

3x3x48=432

That’s for the weekdays. Now add the same number for the weekend shows and the total comes to:

432+432=864

Allow me to say that in words: eight hundred and sixty- four guests sit and go yak yak yak on the screen every week (full disclosure: these include this writer too). Now this may not be a completely accurate number as guests are repeated on shows but it should give you a rough idea of the number of tele-troopers we are talking about.

Let me halve the number of guests here to factor in the duplications. So 864/2=432. The final formula is thus:

Total tele-troopers: Total anchors (250) plus total guests (432). Which means:

Total: 250+432=682.

We can say then, with rough approximation, that Pakistan endures 682 tele-troopers in its daily life. These 682 people drive the cycle of conversation and are in turn driven by it. As this cycle speeds up like a runaway rollercoaster, no one seems to have the time — or perhaps the inclination — to consider what drives those who drive us?

Ratings? Yes sure they do. But what then drives ratings? Here the plot thickens. Ratings are a reflection (howsoever crude) of what the viewers like to watch. But the answer is never as simple as the rating numbers reflect because audience preferences can and do shift like desert sand. Tastes mature, patterns evolve and content-consumption transforms with the times.

In the early days of private TV channels in Pakistan (2002 onwards), viewers were hooked on to heated political discussions and animated verbal fights because this was a novelty and contrasted sharply with the tele-diet of sterile PTV shows that viewers had been accustomed to.

But here’s the thing about novelty: it wears off with time. The smarter ones among the tele-troopers recognised the waning novelty of ‘cock-fights and cat-fights’ on TV and began to experiment with new formats. An element of seriousness began to creep into shows. But only an element and not much.

Television needs to entertain, not just inform. And more than this, it needs to engage the audience. Some talk shows broke away from the pack and garnered a following by providing sermon-style content that mixed titillating political tidbits with analysis and opinion of the tele-trooper.

Format and content has always been an important factor in determining the impact of a show — but much more important is who is delivering this content. So when 250 of them are delivering it, then as Yeats said it, “the centre cannot hold; things fall apart”.

And boy, do they fall apart!

Of these 250 tele-troopers, a handful come with solid understanding of issues honed over years and decades in active, full-time journalism. But even these few men and women of our media industry are not expected to know as much as people expect them to know. Of the 250 troopers, perhaps a dozen fall into the ‘serious journalist’ category.

They are followed by those tele-troopers who were professionally born into the TV age, which means they entered the field of media after 2002. A few of them have blossomed into engaging TV personalities over the years, and yet the limitations of the medium puts a limit on the depth of their content.

This category of tele-troopers is followed by those who have graduated to talk shows as a consequence of supply-demand mechanics. The requirements of the job therefore diluted further to fill the yawning appetite of primetime airtime.

What of the tele-guests? The politicos come to sprout their hackneyed party lines most of which have been formulated by their higher-ups and handed down like baked cookies to be shared on air. A majority come completely unprepared. But in this case they are not fully to blame because hardly any talk show team tells the guest what the topic of discussion is. They are expected to sit down and wing it. Of course, the topic is hardly a surprise: it is always the “current situation”.

So how does all this add up?

Imagine a big cooking pot (daig as we call it). Place it firmly on our national landscape. Now let’s cook up the unhealthy media diet we all consume, by using the following ingredients and method:

Throw in the 250 tele-troopers and their 432 tele-guests. Add plenty of sub-standard content which is rich on newsiness but low on substance, sprinkle generous amounts of herd mentality, toss in a dollop of animated body language and plastic expressions, mix some powdered stereotypes and pre-conceived notions and cook on high heat. Stir frequently with ill-timed questions.

Make sure to keep sensitive topics and controversial red lines to the minimum so the dish is easily digestible. Once it is ready, garnish with a large dose of politically partisan agendas that are freely available from the shop next door. The shops, in fact, also deliver to your doorstep.

Serve steaming hot.

Except, there’s a problem. This diet is making us fat and unhealthy. It may drive our conversation and shape our national discourse but it does so at the cost of dumbing everything down. TV does that everywhere, not just here, but that’s where other platforms come in to add value to national discourse.

We in Pakistan, however, are dangerously deprived of such value-added inputs. There is hardly any serious reporting being done on any media platform anymore; the type of reporting that could go deep into issues after peeling off layers of official-speak and superficiality.

Long-form journalism that describes material running into thousands of words didn’t die — it was never born. And who reads books here?

Those who consume a diet of high-value content either never make it to the screen or if they do, they are unable to process this content when held hostage inside the iron-cage of tele-troopers, their pre-packaged tele-content fettered in the dos and don’ts of current wisdom and their well-set, innovation-challenged format. This format and the discourse that is served on it loves the talking heads and adores the muted mind.

Wanna join the circus? I did.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 27^th, 2019.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.