Absent media ethics.

Byline: Zeeshan Salahuddin

IN July 2010, I was working for a private news channel in the country when Airblue flight 202 crashed in Margalla Hills in Islamabad, killing all 152 souls on board. In the opening hour of the coverage, I noticed a graphic that started running on the channel's screen, of a plane taking off from the bottom left, and crashing into a billowing ball of fire on the bottom right. This occurred in a loop, roughly every 10 seconds. When flagged, the director news (to his credit) immediately took it off air and chastised the newsroom shift-in-charge.

This small example illustrates Pakistani broadcast media's inability to rationalise ethics in journalism, mowing down every conceivable standard in their relentless pursuit of being the 'first', 'biggest', or 'best'.

Ten years later, the situation is not very different. PIA flight 8303 crashed in Karachi, and the broadcast coverage by local television channels was deplorable, horrifying, and utterly disgraceful.

Journalists could be seen screaming into microphones that they had recorded footage of all injured and dead, so that 'we can bring it to you first'. Casualties were displayed across television screens for a period of time, with nary a thought for the families of the injured or deceased. The passenger manifest was publicly shared without following internationally and widely established conventions with regard to privacy, consent or the obvious priority to first inform the family.

Broadcast media's coverage of the PIA crash was deplorable.

Another channel played the last few moments of the mayday recording on loop. News anchors, hosts, and media personalities began theorising as to what may have caused the crashed as early as 3:30pm, less than an hour after the plane went down. All of this was exacerbated by screaming reporters claiming that they had first arrived on the scene, 'even before rescue personnel got there'.

The list goes on and on. In every sense, broadcast media showed the utmost level of unethical, despicable, and frankly disgusting behaviour.

Electronic broadcast media in Pakistan spares no effort to highlight instances where its freedoms are infringed upon (justified in its own right), but never seems to look inward and determine if it is at fault for, well, anything. While freedom of the media needs to be protected and treated as sacrosanct, why is it that this sanctity does not extend to their own coverage? Why is it that it is considered unethical to...