Re: Govt not to issue licence to Geo English
^ I agree with you partially. Yellow journalism is destructive, but if we give government the power to regulate media, then we lose the whole concept of independence of media.
In most civilized societies, journalism is self-monitored, through a privately funded Central Council that hears all cases of media irregularities. Plus, there are market forces at work, meaning if a media channel is so biased that it is irritating people, their viewers will decline and the channel will go down simply by losing money. In US, for example, pretty much all media has some or the other political bias (Fox is right, NBC is left etc), but government does not bear upon them. Of course, in Pakistan, media independance is all new, so right now people may be going a bit crazy (aapay se bahar) and it will take a while for everything to settle down and come to some kind of happy medium. That will be a real mature form of media.
Pakistan can learn from the experiences of other countries and should set up media self-regulatory organizations to govern such things. Unfortunately, personal egos and lack of planning is preventing people from seeing the big picture.
Brother, I did not write Government control. I meant laws against bias reporting based on lies or degrading, disrespecting, dehumanising or influencing public opinion using twisted reporting.
Pakistan is a third world country and most in country can get influenced by media without doing their own research, so media has to follow strict rules of fairness.
West control media using liable laws, but Pakistan need more stringent laws with stronger punishments. Those who will decide that media has overstepped laws would not be government but Judiciary.
Just imagine that national media starting sectarian division and violence, would that be acceptable? Well, Mullah Swat was doing that. Though National media did not got involved in such thing to great extend, but during Lal-Masjid episode they did to extend tried to divide society on basis of Religious and anti-religious, and that cannot be allowed. Same is true regarding political bias reporting and dividing country on political bias, making one group as evil and other as angel ... and so on.
It is history of Pakistan media that, some media made PPP as party of devils, Some made PML(Q) as party of devils and some made PML(N) as party of devils. Whoever can pay to journalists or owner of Media, they get what they want, regardless of truth. One could promote their party and affiliations and expose other party using true information, but to demonising parties or individuals using blatant lies and twisted information is unacceptable.
