The senseless media coverage of Flight ED202

The country mourns yet another tragedy, the horrifying Airblue crash on the morning of July 28. There has been round-the-clock coverage of the disaster, something we expect in this age of 24-hour news cycles. What we shouldn't have expected was the offensive and absolutely tasteless reporting from our television news channels.

In the hours after the plane crash, some of our major news networks thought it necessary to send their reporters barging into the homes of the victims' families, shoving microphones in their faces and asking the sobbing mothers of the victims for a quote. Some anchors were content to pour over the physical descriptions of the bodies in excruciatingly morbid detail without sparing a thought for the friends and families of the deceased. Geo decided that a colourful animation of a plane repeatedly crashing and bursting into flames would add to the gravitas of its reporting. CNN, who were showing images from Geo, repeatedly apologised for the obscene and tasteless graphic and eventually blocked it out.

At best, the news networks are brainless, insensitive and completely oblivious to the sentiments of the people watching them. At worst, there is a cynical and sinister drive from the editorial staff of each channel urging its reporters to go for the most explicit details and the most gut-wrenching imagery. It reeks of exploiting people's morbid curiosity and it shows a media willing to stoop as low as possible in the quest for ratings. This isn't reporting, it's glorified wreckage gazing.

The knee-jerk response is to advocate more regulation in the media. This is tricky business for the minute we begin to start muzzling the press, we begin to tread on free speech. Government intervention and regulation of the media will always do more harm than good. That's why regulation shouldn't be a legal issue, it should be an ethical one.

Our electronic media has grown exponentially but the training and experience of our journalists hasn't matched it. The result is a class of journalists unwilling to skilfully report and ready to rapidly bludgeon us with a mutated mix of information and imagery while rapidly moving on to the next story. Journalism ethics is something that gets left by the wayside, indeed most reporters simply are not even aware of what it means.

The public needs to hold its media accountable. Unfortunately, public opinion has rarely counted for much in Pakistan, which is why in order to affect change in your media you have to hit them where it hurts: their advertising revenue. In addition to letters and articles, the public needs to petition not just the news channels, but the companies that advertise with them. Pressure needs to be created so that these companies can threaten to pull their advertising from unethical channels.

Ethics isn't a law, it's an unwritten code and it should be enforced from within. The media needs to police its own. We need more media personalities, writers, TV anchors and reporters to recognise and condemn ethical violations in the industry. Journalism ethics need to be publicly discussed on large forums, not just restricted to blogs and opinions, so that a consensus can be reached. Right now, it's easy to immediately condemn and forget but to effect real change, it's up to us to consistently create the pressure and debate the standards we hold our media to.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 30^th, 2010.