Former editor highlights crisis of mainstream media in Pakistan: too much commentary, little reporting

 JournalismPakistan.com |  Published: 6 June 2023

Arifa Noor discusses the decline of mainstream media in Pakistan, highlighting the prevalence of commentary over factual reporting. She notes that viewers are increasingly turning to social media for news due to perceived biases in traditional media.

Summary

ISLAMABAD—The mainstream media in Pakistan has become bland, with too much commentary and little reporting, mainly because of polarization and pressures over the past few years.

In her weekly column—Crisis of mainstream media—in Dawn, Arifa Noor, a former resident editor of the paper in Islamabad, maintained: "Anecdotally, it seems few people now bother watching talk shows, preferring to only catch the few clips which are doing the social media rounds."

No one, she maintained, it seems, wants 40 minutes of the same group of people saying the same things over and over again on multiple screens. "If a large number of channels—and there are just too many—are discussing the same topics every day for nearly five hours, everyone's views become common knowledge and add to the perception that each analyst or journalist is now biased."

Arifa said all this is driving people to social media, where there is 'news', even if it is sensational. "If the analysis is biased, so what? It suits the viewer's own bias, and it is not as if mainstream media is any less biased."

Overall the article maintained that print media made way for electronic media, mainly TV channels, which are now being replaced by social media.

She added that if the media want to regain the people's trust, it has to carry out some introspection on how it lost that trust in the first place.