The good, the bad and the ugly

Pakistanis are used to carnage. We’re used to bomb blasts, assassinations and industrial accidents. We know that when the tickers turn red, more often than not, something terrible has happened. That’s what happened on the night of April 15, only the blast wasn’t in Battagram, but in Boston. After the first ticker, on a local TV channel, telling us of an explosion in Boston, the next ticker was that President Barack Obama had taken notice of the blast. That prompted quite a few cynical laughs, leading some to say that our channels are far too used to covering local acts of terror, the reporting of which follows a predictable pattern. First, a blast is heard, then confirmed, then the casualties are reported and then the government takes “notice”. Inevitably, a “search and rescue operation” is conducted and so on and so forth. We wondered, black humour being a national survival trait, if the next ticker would say that Obama had called for a report within 24 hours and whether any officials would be suspended — following a suo motu of course. At this point, we switched onto CNN to see how the US media, relatively less experienced in reporting acts of terror, was handling it. What I saw was less impactful than what I didn’t see. Sure, there was the crowd running in terror, the plume of smoke from the blast and so on, and the odd scene, quickly edited out, of wounded people. Then, the footage stopped altogether and we were shown still images of the scene. They were quiet and poignant. Not bad, considering the last act of terror on US soil was 9/11 itself. Missing were the crying people, the torn bodies and the hysterical reporters heaping blame on the authorities and trying to trample all over the scene in the name of the freedom of the press. No one stuck a mic in the face of the parents of the eight-year-old boy who had died and asked them how they felt. No one used a wailing woman or a wounded person being wheeled into the hospital in their headline footage. There were no montages of misery masquerading as opening titles. By contrast, look at how our TV channels covered the April 16 attack in Peshawar. One zoomed in on a critically injured man as he lay dying. Another actually showed a charred body, half melted into the driver’s seat of the car that had been attacked. It wasn’t the first time that images that should never be shown on TV made it to prime time, and it won’t be the last. After covering hundreds of such attacks, our media has yet to evolve a code of conduct, has yet to go beyond mealy-mouthed expressions of regret. And the viewers have yet to demand that they do.

Soon came another marked difference in approach, not from the media but from the government. The US president appeared before the cameras to share his peoples’ pain and comfort them. It was a short address, over as quickly as it had begun, but I can only imagine that it would have given a confused nation a feeling that someone was on the job. I say I can only imagine it because I’ve never actually experienced it. No matter the scale of the disaster, the extent of the carnage, I’ve never seen one of our leaders — a prime minister or a president — actually reach out and try to comfort the people. Whether it’s Baldia, Alamdaar Road or Abbas Town, they’ve never bothered to actually try and lead. It’s almost enough to make you long for a meray aziz humwatno moment.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 20^th, 2013.